BATON ROUGE – The return of LSU Basketball under Coach Will Wade gets its exhibition start on Thursday night at 6:30 p.m. in Lake Charles as the LSU Tigers travel to the Townley Law Arena to take on McNeese State University.
The game, being billed as the “Bill vs. Will Showdown” is expected to be close to, if not 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 in 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, against his former LSU assistant Bill Armstrong.
Armstrong was named head coach at McNeese prior to the 2025-26 season when Coach Wade left for his one year at NC State.
Tipoff is set for 6:30 p.m. Neither school will broadcast the contest on radio and there is no streaming broadcast of the game. Live stats can be followed at LSUsports.net and social updates on “X” @LSUBasketball.
In all 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,” Coach Wade said in an earlier media session 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 Nichols State in another hurricane benefit 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 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 for all non-conference games are available at the LSU Athletics Ticket Office.