Can blowout win at Texas A&M help turn around Mizzou’s season? Players think so

If Missouri basketball ends up turning around its season and finding a way into a postseason tournament, Saturday’s blowout win at Texas A&M might be looked back on as the turning point.

While the Tigers (10-6, 1-3 SEC) have a ways to go dig themselves out of their rough start to conference play, Saturday’s 66-43 win reminded MU coach Cuonzo Martin of how his team looked when the Tigers were 9-3 at the end of December.

Martin said Missouri’s blowout loss to No. 3 Tennessee “took something out of our guys” because MU had a strong start against the Vols before imploding towards the end of the first half.

While the Aggies aren’t the Sweet 16 team of last season, it wasn’t who Mizzou beat that mattered to the Tigers, but how they played.

Sophomore Jeremiah Tilmon played 27 minutes and only had a whistle called on him once, “a world record” in the eyes of one official, who joked with the 6-foot-10 center after he got called for his only foul in the game’s final minutes.

Tilmon’s importance to Missouri can’t be understated as the Tigers are 19-2 when he scores more than 10 points. On Saturday he had 14 points and six rebounds.

The East St. Louis, Ill. native was all smiles over his foul trouble-free performance and said that while fans think the officials have it in for him, a lot of his fouls are self-inflicted.

“Jeremiah acknowledges where his errors are,” Martin said. “He probably played 75 percent of what he could be. We’re a different team when he’s on the floor.”

Tilmon’s performance was huge for Missouri, but senior point guard Jordan Geist was just as quick to point to the Tigers’ defensive effort. Senior Kevin Puryear, a Blue Springs South graduate, held Aggies forward Savion Flagg to just five points, despite Flagg averaging 18 in SEC play going into Saturday’s game.

Missouri held the Aggies to just 43 points and 26 percent shooting after letting Tennessee and South Carolina score an average of 86 points against MU in its first two SEC games.

The Tigers switched up their defensive approach, which Geist thought made all the difference.

“We have a huge problem with trying to rely on help-side defense,” he said. “When we guard one-on-one, it makes everything easier.”

Another dimension of Missouri’s defense was walk-on Ronnie Suggs, who played 18 minutes, a career high for him at MU. Suggs played his first two seasons on scholarship at Bradley before transferring to MU and was all over the floor for the Tigers.

Suggs had four rebounds but switched onto multiple defenders and dived for loose balls. He had a few good looks on offense, but Martin, a defensive guy, wasn’t concerned about that. He expects Suggs to be a bigger part of the offense going forward.

“He’ll guard anyone,” Geist said of Suggs. “He’ll go out and guard with is whole heart.”

Missouri still has to prove that its performance against A&M wasn’t just a fluke and now has to go into Bud Walton Arena on Wednesday, a tough place to play, and handle Arkansas, which has lost four straight.

As Texas A&M forward Josh Nebo, who led the Aggies with 12 points in the loss to MU, took questions on his team’s performance after Saturday’s game, his answers were drowned out by the cheers coming from Missouri’s locker room.

Geist said the game reminded him of Missouri’s win at Alabama last January, which sparked a five-game winning streak and ultimately put MU back in the NCAA Tournament. He thinks this could be the game that gets the team back to where it stood after an undefeated December.

“We just needed to get some confidence,” he said.

This story was originally published January 20, 2019 at 2:14 PM.