This is about the stunning revival of the Missouri Tigers, or how a team goes from 0-18 in its conference to picking off top-five opponents one after another. Please do not rush the court.
Yep, Dennis Gates has everything covered at Mizzou, including fan behavior after his guys put 110 points on the No. 4 team in the land. You know it’s a highlight show keeper when a coach grabs the microphone with one second left in one of the biggest wins of his career and pleads with the happy masses to stay off the court, lest the school be writing out a check for a $500,000 fine.
The fans stayed put, of course, after the Tigers dusted off Alabama 110-98 because just about everything is turning out right these days for Missouri basketball, only one year removed from the deep bottom of a big barrel. Time to give full notice to this renaissance. And so, there are 15 things to know — matching the ranking this week in the Associated Press poll about the team from the Show Me State that is showing … well, just about everyone.
1. Riddled by injuries and misfortune, players missed a total of 111 games because of one ailment or another. The Tigers sagged to 8-24 last season and 0-18 in the SEC. Since they were one-and-done in the league tournament, it was 0-19. Missouri had not endured a winless conference season since 1908. Flip the calendar one year and the Tigers are 20-6 and 9-4 in a breathtakingly strong SEC consortium. That puts them at No. 13 in the latest NET rankings. They finished 157th last season.
2. While on the subject of statistical reboots, Missouri is 13th in the nation in scoring offense. A year ago, the Tigers were 215th. They lead the nation by making 20.1 free throws a game. Last season, they were 13th in the SEC. They’re 42nd in the country in 3-point shooting percentage. They were 281st in 2024. They have outrebounded eight of 13 SEC opponents. In the past two seasons, they did that once in 36 games.
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3. “Our guys prepared for the moment and seized it,” Gates said about Wednesday night. They’ve been doing that a lot lately. This makes three top-five teams in the AP poll (Alabama, Florida, Kansas) that Missouri has beaten. Auburn is the only other team in America that can say that. The Tigers hadn’t done it in 36 years.
4. The SEC is a known crocodile-infested lake this season. But Missouri has won its past three conference games against Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama by a total of 49 points, not to mention Arkansas earlier by 18 and Mississippi State by 27. The Tigers’ only losses in the past month have been four points to Tennessee and three to Texas A&M — and both ranked this week in the top seven in the AP. “We’re going in a direction, steady, slowly, patiently,” Gates said. “And we’re not leaving details behind, and you can see our team growing.”
5. Missouri has had three games with only three turnovers, the first SEC team to do that in at least 20 years. The Tigers had but eight turnovers Wednesday on their way to 110 points.
6. Missouri tends to start games as if it’s the 100-meter dash. The Tigers have had double-digit halftime leads in 16 of 26 games. They jumped ahead of Alabama 12-0 and were up 13 at halftime.
7. The Missouri bench contributes 35.96 points a game, fourth most in the country. Caleb Grill has a lot to do with that. You could make a case that no college player in Division I is a more accurate barometer of his team’s fate than this sixth-year graduate transfer. Grill averages 16 points in Missouri’s victories and 5.0 in the defeats. Last season, the Tigers were 7-2 with him in the lineup and 1-22 after he was lost to injury. He’s third in scoring for Missouri and is seventh in the nation in 3-point shooting percentage. And he does all that work coming off the bench.
8. The Tigers come up with 10 steals a game, fifth most in the nation and tops for a power conference team.
9. The roster responsible for this U-turn is a mix of new blood and holdovers. Grill and Tamar Bates were at Missouri last year, having transferred from Iowa State and Indiana. Leading scorer Mark Mitchell, who had 31 against Alabama, came in this season from Duke, guard Tony Perkins from Iowa, reserves Marques Warrick from Northern Kentucky and Jacob Crews from UT Martin. Starters Trent Pierce and Anthony Robinson II are sophomores who have been in the program. All eight have led the team in scoring at least one game.
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10. Bates is fifth in the nation this season in free throw shooting, and his 91.8 career percentage is the best among active players. He has taken 220 free throws in his career and missed 18. He is also a 50-percent field goal shooter and nearly 40 percent from behind the arc. Bates has averaged 13.5 and 13.4 points a game in two seasons at Missouri. His numbers in two years at Indiana were 3.9 and 6.1.
11. The architect of all this is Gates, who is in his third season after a good run at Cleveland State. He once was a four-year college player at California with a modest career scoring average of 3.8 points. But he also had 148 assists and 100 steals and graduated in three years with a degree in sociology — and that’s not easy at Berkeley. He was a two-time Pac-10 all-academic section.
12. Gates is also one of the niftier sideline dressers, if you don’t mind a lack of variety. No warmups for him. He wears the same black suit every game with a gold tie and the shoes he had on for his introductory press conference at Missouri in 2022. “If somebody decided to steal my suit,” he said in one interview, “I’d be in trouble.”
13. Missouri always yearns for a March breakthrough that has never come. The Tigers have played in five Elite Eights and lost them all. They might be the best program never to play in a Final Four, or at least run neck and neck with Tennessee.
14. About the court rushing. The Missouri fans did that after sacking Kansas, costing the school $250,00. By rule, a second offense would be $500,000, which is why Gates grabbed the microphone Wednesday night. “We need that money to go to NIL,” he said later in his press conference. “We don’t need to be getting fines out there.”
15. Alabama coach Nate Oats had to cut short his post-game press conference Wednesday when a small fire broke out in Mizzou Arena and alarms started clanging. Can it get more appropriate than that? And it gave Oats the chance for one of the great exit lines of the season.
“They were on fire tonight for sure,” he said. “We’ve known that for about two hours.”
