BATON ROUGE — The LSU Tiger basketball continues to impress and improve on the home floor of the Maravich Assembly Center and Saturday they stood toe-to-toe with nationally-ranked Mississippi State, downing the Bulldogs, 69-62, behind the strong play of sophomore Brandon Bass.
Bass finished with 26 points (hitting 11-of-14 field goals, including a three) and grabbed 11 rebounds with five blocks and two steals to lead LSU and in the final seven minutes when LSU needed a big bucket, it seemed the ball ended up in Bass’ hands and eventually in the bucket.
But it was also the scoring of Darrel Mitchell that helped the Tigers (now 11-6 overall, 4-2 in the SEC West) as the junior scored 20 points on 6-of-12 shooting, which included three treys. Mitchell also had seven assists.
Lawrence Roberts led Mississippi State (16-5, 4-3 in the SEC) with 15 points and 12 rebounds, but the LSU defense limited to 3-of-11 shooting from the field. Walter Sharpe had 12 and Gary Ervin added 10.
The Bulldogs came in ranked 24th in the Associated Press poll and it marks the first LSU win over a ranked-team in the AP poll since a win at Florida last season. Since then LSU has lost four games to ranked teams.
“Again, I’m proud of our players,” said LSU Coach John Brady. “We carried out the game plan. We shared the ball for the most part, we made it tough for them to score, we changed defenses from time to time. We followed the game plan to guard (Lawrence) Roberts and I’m really proud of our players in what they were able to do.
“It wasn’t one of our better shooting nights, but we got the ball to Brandon with the lead,” Brady said. “And he made some good baskets for us. Glen (Davis) and Brandon still rebounded the ball for us pretty well, and we got some offensive rebounds that really helped us out.”
LSU led 33-30 at the intermission in a first half when there were 10 ties and no lead bigger than five. But the Bulldogs got an easy layup off the start of the second half throw in and then stole the ball back and got another layup to take a 34-33 lead 34 seconds into the half. But the Tigers came back 20 seconds later to take the lead for good on a Bass three-pointer.
Mitchell hit a jumper and a free throw, Davis hit a free throw and Mitchell a trey to put LSU up nine, 43-34, with 16:33 to play. LSU pushed the lead first to 10, 50-40 at the 12:37 mark and up to 12 on the back end of back-to-back layups by Bass that made it 56-44 with 9:50 to play.
But Mississippi State answered back and eventually would cut the lead to one, 60-59, on a Sharpe layup with 2:39 to play. At the other end, Bass answered with a jumper (62-59, 2:17). But Ervin got a bucket on the ensuing possession (62-61, 1:56), but that was as close as the Bulldogs got. Tack Minor found Mitchell for a corner three-pointer with 1:31 to play to make it 65-61.
LSU made all four free throw attempts down the stretch to ice the game.
The Tigers go on the road next week at Georgia on Wednesday (7:30 p.m. EST) in Athens and then to Tennessee for a Fox Sports Net game in Knoxville (7 p.m. EST) on Saturday. LSU’s next home game is Feb. 9 against Auburn.