LSU has put a midseason slide behind it to return to .500 in the Southeastern Conference standings.
The Tigers (18-7, 6-6) will seek their third consecutive victory when they host Georgia (6-19, 1-11) on Wednesday night in Baton Rouge, La.
“That’s a sigh of relief,” Tari Eason said after scoring 23 points in LSU’s 69-65 home victory against Mississippi State on Saturday. “It’s good to get a second straight win and get the monkey off our back a bit.”
LSU was ranked as high as No. 12 in the country before losing six of seven games. Then came a win at Texas A&M on Feb. 8 before the win against Mississippi State.
The Tigers led the Bulldogs by 12 at halftime, fell behind by three, went ahead by nine and saw the lead shrink to five with a minute left. But they held on.
“We’ve got to close the games out better; that was atrocious,” LSU coach Will Wade said, “but after what we have been though in the past couple of weeks, this is huge.”
Georgia, meanwhile, shot 42.1 percent from the floor in an 80-68 home loss to South Carolina on Saturday, the Bulldogs’ fifth straight setback.
“If you’re going to win games, you’ve got to make shots,” Georgia coach Tom Crean said. “Bottom line, we didn’t make enough shots.”
It wasn’t just the missed shots that bothered Crean. He also was upset that his players allowed misses to negatively impact their focus on defense.
“Unfortunately, the disappointment of missing shots affected our defense,” Crean said. “That’s just a continued area of growth that we’ve got to get better at.”
Georgia trailed by four points at halftime and briefly seized the lead early in the second half. But the Bulldogs couldn’t get enough stops or make enough shots to keep up with the Gamecocks.
“You cannot be living in the last play,” Crean said. “And that’s the thing that I try to harp on the most, because you can control your mentality when things aren’t going your way.”
–Field Level Media