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COLUMBIA, Mo. — Dennis Gates doesn’t talk about last year.

You know, the 0-18 skid through regular-season Southeastern Conference play that Missouri men’s basketball endured — the wrong kind of history made, the wrong kind of streak to leave lingering into the next season.

Gates doesn’t talk about last year because he doesn’t have to. He says he learned what he needed to learn. Ten scholarship players enrolled at Mizzou over the offseason, and he saw enough development from the five players who stuck around.

“I’ve not one time brought up last year to this team at all,” Gates said. “I’ve learned, as a head coach, what I needed to learn. We had a great June, so if you’re counting those days from June 1, when these guys moved on campus and started building the program, the character, the identity, that’s where this team starts at. They did a good job. We didn’t put that stress on them. ������Ƶ wasn’t responsible (for last year).”

Yet there’s no denying that 669 days passed between MU’s 83-67 victory over Louisiana State on Tuesday and its previous conference win, which came during the 2023 SEC tournament. There’s no denying that the 21 league losses — one to end that 2023 tournament run, 19 in total last year and this season’s opener at Auburn — in between were varying shades of ugly.

And there’s no denying that part of the reason Gates didn’t need to bring up the losing streak was that his players knew.

Like guard Tamar Bates, who transferred from Indiana before the start of the 2023-24 season and had yet to beat an SEC team since his arrival in Columbia. Getting past LSU to finally snap the streak had to mean something extra, right?

“Simply put, yes,” Bates said. “I was here, so yeah.”

He scored 20 points for the second time this season and grabbed a season-high nine rebounds.

“My teammates probably realized why I was so fired up no matter how much we were up because we just wanted to get that first win as a program,” Bates said.

Mizzou downed LSU rather handily behind a change to the starting lineup that produced results from all involved: Gates moved center Josh Gray to the bench and added forward Trent Pierce to the starting five.

It was a bold move by the third-year coach, given that the combination of Anthony Robinson II, Tony Perkins, Bates, Pierce and Mark Mitchell had played in a game only one other time this season — a mere seven possessions in the season opener against Memphis that was two months ago.

The result was positive, though: a smaller and more limber offense that used Mitchell as its center for stretches — a shift that clicked with the screens, handoffs and inside-the-arc isolation plays that the Tigers like to give their centers. Pierce added a bit of shooting and defensive versatility to the lineup.

Gray, playing as a reserve for the first time this season, still earned nearly 16 minutes of action against his former school. He was impactful off the bench, securing 10 rebounds to match his season high. Gray was one of the players who earned praise from Gates after the game.

“Ten rebounds,” Gates said. “It’s in the stats.”

Robinson scored 16 points in a bounce-back performance after a quieter past few games. Guard Marques Warrick followed up a 19-point outing against Auburn with 12 against LSU.

His production was one of the few similarities between Mizzou’s first SEC game of the season and its second. That underscored the program’s streak-snapping victory: how different it was from the results of the past.

Like the Auburn game over the weekend, a resounding 84-68 defeat on the road, where the combination of a hostile crowd and the start of conference play had Missouri, perhaps, a bit too amped up.

“That excitement led us to a paralysis,” Gates said. “Did not play a good basketball game. But this one, they got to play how they wanted to play.”

For this year’s team, that involves getting extra possessions through steals. Against a turnover-prone LSU team, Mizzou got plenty of takeaways — 14, to be exact. The key to MU’s system is turning defense into offense, and it got that too, with 20 points off turnovers to LSU’s 11 — also leading the visitors 16-9 in second-chance points.

Combine those margins on “extra possessions” and you get 16 points — the margin of victory for Missouri.

Tuesday’s win brought back echoes of the last time Mizzou and LSU played each other: March 9, 2024, in Baton Rouge.

That was last year’s regular-season finale, and loss No. 18 in a row to a conference opponent for MU. It went like so many other games had last season: Missouri seemed very much in the mix and then blew the opportunity down the stretch.

In that clash, Mizzou led by six at halftime, which was the biggest lead it had had over an SEC opponent at the break. With 15 minutes and change to go in the game, Missouri had led by seven — only for a 14-0 run to have LSU up by seven three minutes later.

But on Tuesday, MU took a commanding first-half lead and held on. Gates’ timeouts to handle nervy moments in the second half fit a relative definition of nervy: The closest LSU came to staging a comeback in the second was cutting the gap to 12.

So the streak is snapped. A beatable Vanderbilt team (13-2, 1-1 SEC) comes to town at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, an opportunity for the Tigers to launch an SEC winning streak. The focus will shift back to Missouri’s push for a spot in the eventual NCAA Tournament field.

But for now, Gates doesn’t need to talk about last year because its run of futility isn’t lurking in a corner of Mizzou Arena anymore.

“It definitely meant a lot,” Bates said.