BATON ROUGE — Marie Ferdinand tied a career-high with 25 points to lead the 14th-ranked LSU women’s basketball team to its fourth straight Southeastern Conference win with a 69-59 victory over Ole Miss here Sunday at the Maravich Assembly Center.
DeTrina White added her seventh double-double of the season with 13 points and 15 rebounds, while Katrina Hibbert had 12 points and April Brown 11 for the Lady Tigers.
With the win, LSU moved into sole possession of first place in the SEC with a 5-1 league mark. The Lady Tigers are 14-3 overall. LSU’s 5-1 start is the best in school history and it’s marks only the second time that the Lady Tigers have opened the league schedule with wins in five of their first six games. The 1996-97 team also opened with a 5-1 mark.
LSU’s four-game SEC winning streak is the longest for the Lady Tigers since the 1986-87 squad won four straight. The 1982-83 team holds the school-record with six consecutive league wins.
Ole Miss, who beat LSU last year in Oxford by a 66-59 margin, dropped to 11-6 overall and 0-4 in league play.
“It’s a conference win and I’m a happy lady right now,” LSU coach Sue Gunter said. “It was not a very pretty first half, and I think the first half ended in a way that just wants to make you cry because we had an opportunity to go up probably by seven.
“In the second half we came out and we didn’t make many adjustments because there weren’t any to be made. We just came out and did what we do and that’s execute on the offensive end, get on the boards, play good defense, and play smart.”
Ole Miss jumped on the Lady Tigers early as the Lady Rebels, behind the 3-point shooting of Von Kirk grabbed a 13-8 lead at the 14:56 mark on Kirk’s third 3-pointer of the first half. The Lady Tigers battled back to tie the game at 14-14 on a jumper by Hibbert three minutes later and from there the teams went back-and-forth for the rest of the half.
LSU appeared to have gained some momentum just before halftime as Ferdinand went coast-to-coast for a layup and then Ke-Ke Tardy hit a jumper with 29 seconds left to give the Lady Tigers their biggest lead at 33-27. However, after Ole Miss failed to score on its next possession, LSU point guard Angelia Crockett turned the ball back over to the Lady Rebels with 12 seconds left. Ole Miss’ TaShondrea Moton nailed a 3-pointer at the buzzer to cut the LSU lead to 33-30 at halftime.
Ole Miss’ Kirk tied the game at 34-34 on a baseline jumper just a minute into the second half. The teams were tied again at 38-38 after a layup by Ole Miss’ Frankie Boyd at the 15:31 mark. LSU then reeled of eight straight points to take its biggest lead at 46-38 on a pair of free throws by Brown with 13:28 to play. Ole Miss didn’t back down as the Lady Rebels, behind 3-pointers by Chandra Dorsey and Becky Myatt, tied the game at 48-48 just three minutes later.
After LSU had taken a 51-48 on a 3-pointer by Hibbert, Dorsey brought the Lady Rebels back to within one at 51-50 on a driving layup. However, Ole Miss went the next six minutes without scoring as the Lady Tigers extended the lead to 58-50 on a jumper in the paint by Ferdinand. Hibbert hit a 3-pointer a minute later to give the Lady Tigers a 61-53 lead and LSU never looked back from there.
“We had a stretch were we didn’t score for about seven or eight minutes,” Ole Miss coach Ron Aldy said. “Hibbert hit a couple of key 3’s during that stretch and from there they opened it (the lead) and kept it.”
Gunter agreed.
“Hibbert hit a 3-pointer that was just huge when it dropped. Hibbert is a good shooter and she had been taking good shots. They just weren’t falling until that point. That was a very big basket.”
For the game, the Lady Tigers turned the ball over only 12 times compared to 18 for Ole Miss. LSU, the worst rebounding team in the SEC, hauled in 46 rebounds, while limiting the Lady Rebels to just 35 boards. Ole Miss entered the game as the top rebounding team in the SEC with just over 45 a game.
“I’m stunned about the rebounds,” Gunter said. “I thought it was a misprint in the stats. We did a good job on the boards and we knew we had to in order to have a chance. This was very much a team win. We got some good performances from our bench.”
The Lady Tigers return to action on Tuesday as they play host to the University of New Orleans at 7 p.m. at the Maravich Assembly Center.