BATON ROUGE — LSU’s Jaime Lloreda made a lay up with 11:18 to play to give LSU a 47-46 lead against Auburn Wednesday night at the Maravich Assembly Center.
But no one realized what was about to hit LSU as the 24th-ranked Tigers would fall to Auburn, 80-68.
The Auburn Tigers would go on a 21-0 run over the next 6:10 before Antonio Hudson would hit a field goal at the 4:43 mark. In all, over the last 11 minutes of the contest, Auburn would outscore LSU, 34-21.
The loss sent the Tigers off a five-game winning streak to 17-5 overall and 7-4 in the SEC, while Auburn rose its record to 13-9 and 4-7 in the SEC West, three games behind LSU in the chase for the second place bye in the West. The game was played before the biggest crowd of the season 12,543 paid (11,024 actual).
Tack Minor, who hit three treys in the final three minutes, led LSU with 15 points, Brandon Bass added 13 and Darnel Lazare 10. Ian Young off the bench had 21 points to lead Auburn, while Marco Killingsworth added 20 and Brandon Robinson 17.
LSU played without Regis Koundjia who injured an MCL on Saturday against Florida. He tried to practice Tuesday but couldn’t go very long and was held out of the game. Senior All-American candidate Jaime Lloreda, battling the bursitis in his left knee and a twice sprained ankle against Florida, was limited in his ability, but had 12 points and seven rebounds in 27 minutes of play. Both players status for Saturday’s game at Vanderbilt is unclear.
“There are several things going through my mind,” said LSU Coach John Brady. “But the biggest thing that we did not do what we have been doing and what we are leading the league in — defensive field goal percentage. We are also second or third in rebounding the ball and we showed neither of those (Wednesday). That team (Auburn) scored on us when they wanted to, how they wanted to, over us, through us and beat us on the boards. The 68 points that we scored is enough for us but they just beat us every way possible.
“You know we shot 32 percent from the floor at Alabama and won because we rebounded and defended,” Brady said. “We did not do either of those. I think there are some reasons why. We play really well for a nice stretch of games and then we practice two days without Jaime and without Regis and we are trying to practice with nine guys and it just cut our continuity. It is not an excuse, it is just unfortunate that our team, with all the things that built up tonight, with the crowd and those sort of things I am just disappointed that we played like this as soon as we get a full house. It is unfortunate, but it happens. We just did not have good enough practices to sustain what we needed to sustain.”
Auburn, besides shooting 55.6 for the game, shot 65.4 percent in the last 20 minutes, 17-of-26, and the visiting Tigers hit 5-of-7 three pointers many in the run that gave Auburn the wide lead. Auburn out rebounded LSU, 37-29.
The Tigers go on the road for the next two games, playing next at Vanderbilt in Nashville at 5 p.m. Saturday afternoon in a game televised on SEC-TV/Fox Sports Net.