BATON ROUGE — Ke-Ke Tardy came off the bench to score 18 points to lead 13th-ranked LSU to its eighth straight win as the Lady Tigers rolled to a 77-46 victory over Mercer here Sunday at the Maravich Assembly Center.
With the victory, LSU improved to 8-1 overall as the Lady Tigers have not lost since a season-opening defeat at Texas Tech. The win was LSU’s 14th straight at home as the Lady Tigers ran their December record to 25-1 over the last five years. In addition, LSU stretched its school-record home court winning streak against non-conference teams to 41 straight, a streak that also dates back to January of 1995.
Mercer lost for the second straight game and fell to 6-5 overall. Last year, LSU beat the Bears, 71-42 in Baton Rouge.
The win moved LSU coach Sue Gunter within four victories of 600 for her career as her overall collegiate coaching record stands at 596-267 making her the fourth winningest coach in women’s basketball history.
Joining Tardy in double-figures for the Lady Tigers were DeTrina White with 15 points and Marie Ferdinand with 12 points. Jenny Sessor led Mercer with 11 points, while Tracy Henry added 10 points for the Bears.
“I’m pretty pleased with our performance,” LSU coach Sue Gunter said. “We accomplished some of the goals that we wanted to when we started the game. We wanted to get some quality minutes for our bench and we did that. There were some instances that we weren’t as smooth as we wanted to be, but we did a nice job with our press in the first half and that pretty much took them out of what they wanted to do.
“We still can’t seem to win the battle of the boards, but we shot well tonight so we didn’t have a chance for a lot of offensive rebounds. Overall, I’m satisfied with the win.”
After opening the contest with a sluggish first couple of minutes, the Lady Tigers used their defensive pressure to take control of the contest.
Ferdinand went coast-to-coast for a layup at the 16:38 mark that ignited a 13-2 run for the Lady Tigers. Ferdinand’s layup gave LSU an 8-4 lead and a jumper in the paint by Candice Porter capped the run at the 11:22 mark with the Lady Tigers lead 21-6. Every LSU player played in the first half as the Lady Tigers led 43-19 at halftime.
“You’ll always have a hard time winning with 17 turnovers in the first half,” Mercer coach Billy Holmes said. “We wanted to execute our press break and to be able to establish some type of tempo on offense, and at times we did, but mostly LSU wouldn’t allow us to. This is the most talented team Sue (Gunter) has ever had here and that includes the time I spent in New Orleans.”
In the second half, LSU extended its margin to as many as 38 points, 64-26, on a jumper by Danielle Traylor at the 10:20 mark. With four LSU starters on the bench, Mercer used a 15-4 run over the next five minutes to get within 68-41 on a jumper by Mia Washington at the 5:18 mark. That was as close as the Bears would get as Tardy hit a pair of jumper and Jamie Hawkins added a couple of free throws to extend the LSU lead to 76-42 with 2:36 left.
“Overall it was a good performance by a lot of players,” Gunter said. “(Ke-Ke) Tardy had a good (stat) line. She’s been playing well since the start of the year. She just needs more minutes. We know she can score, we just need her to get better on the defensive end and she’s done that over the last several games.”
For the game, the Lady Tigers connected on 29-of-50 shots from the floor for a season-best 58 percent shooting. LSU limited the Bears to just 35 percent shooting, while forcing Mercer into 22 turnovers. Mercer outrebounded LSU, 33-30, marking the seventh time this season that the Lady Tigers have been outrebounded in a game.
LSU returns to action on Wednesday when the Lady Tigers play host to Wake Forest at 7 p.m. at the Maravich Assembly Center.