BATON ROUGE – The return of LSU Men's Basketball under Head Coach Will Wade gets its start on Thursday night at 6:30 p.m. CT in Lake Charles as the LSU Tigers travel to the Townley Law Arena to take on McNeese in a preseason exhibition.
The game, being billed as the “Bill vs. Will Showdown,” is expected to be close to a sellout in the 4,200-seat on-campus venue. The game matches coach Wade, who is beginning his second stint as head coach at LSU and who was the head coach of McNeese from 2023-25, against his former LSU and McNeese assistant Bill Armstrong.
Armstrong was named head coach at McNeese prior to the 2025-26 season when Wade left for NC State.
There will be no radio nor television broadcast the contest. Live stats can be followed at LSUstats.com and social updates on “X” @LSUBasketball.
In the past three seasons, McNeese had unprecedented success, winning the Southland Conference Championship and advancing to the NCAA Tournament. The 2026-27 Cowboys are expected to be led by SLC Freshman of the Year Larry Johnson, who averaged a team-best 17.4 points per game.
“I’m excited about it,” Wade said when asked about the exhibition. “It’s great for Lake Charles and McNeese. I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for them; if they hadn’t taken a chance on me. I could never repay what those people did for me and my family. It will be weird being on the visiting sideline. Hopefully, they won’t boo us too much. We wanted to build something there that would last.
“It will be a really tough game. The community support there is unparalleled with everybody that’s involved and how they support that program and Bill has done just a phenomenal job of winning at a high level. We’re excited about the opportunity. It will be a great test for us. It will be a tough challenge.”
This will be the first time the Tigers have played a game in Lake Charles since 1986 when LSU played McNeese at Burton Coliseum.
Under recent rules, the NCAA now allows Division I teams to play up to three public exhibition contests against top-division schools. Prior to last year, those games had to be part of a charity event. LSU played at Tulane in 2017 in a hurricane benefit game, in Ruston at Louisiana Tech in 2019 following the tornado on campus and in 2021 at Nicholls in another hurricane-relief contest.
Last year, the Tigers traveled to Orlando to play UCF and this year the two teams will meet again in exhibition play on Oct. 14 in a free-admission game at the Maravich Center.
LSU’s final exhibition game will be at noon CT on Oct. 24 at Florida State.
The 2026-27 regular season will begin on Tuesday, Nov. 3, at 7 p.m. against LSU New Orleans. Tickets are available at LSUtix.net and the LSU Athletics Ticket Office.