Through the summer, I’ve been going through and ranking what I see as the top 10 wins of Dennis Gates’ time at the helm of the Missouri Tiger basketball team.
You can look back at what I’ve already ranked here:
No. 8: Beat No. 14 Mississippi State 88-61 in Starkville, 2025
After a couple of wins in Gates’ first season in Columbia, we’re moving into this past season to talk about him and the Tigers ending a long losing streak in Starkville.
The Tigers hadn’t won a road game against Mississippi State since 2013, dropping seven consecutive matchups at Humphrey Coliseum.
And many of those matchups hadn’t been pretty.
In the seven games since the Tigers’ last win there, they had lost by nine, 15, 12, 19, 27, 15, 39 and 11. They averaged just 62.43 points per game in those matchups.
But this season, the Tigers entered the matchup having won five of their last seven, including an eight-point win against No. 16 Ole Miss to bounce back from the loss at Texas.
And they were rolling right from the start.
Tony Perkins hit a 3, then Mark Mitchell hit another as a sign the Tigers were going to shoot well beyond the arc (they went 15-of-32 as a team).
Trent Pierce turned a steal into a layup and the Tigers lead 10-2 with 16:52 left.
Mississippi State came back to take a 13-12 lead, but the Tigers responded and didn’t trail the rest of the way after a Jacob Crews 3 with 11:37 left.
Missouri’s lead grew to double digits for the first time when Caleb Grill hit a 3 with 50 seconds left before halftime, one of his six makes beyond the arc, to make it 43-31.
Then Josh Gray, who recorded his lone double-double of the season, hit a layup off an offensive rebound with 3 seconds left to send the Tigers into the break up 45-31.
The Tigers maintained a double-digit lead throughout the second half and built to a 20-point margin after Grill hit a 3 to make it 59-37 with 14:13 left.
The lead grew as big as 29 points after Tamar Bates hit a 3 off a Perkins assist with 4:36 left.
Grill led the way with 20 points as he continued one of the hottest shooting stretches I’ve ever seen, going 7-of-12 from the field and 6-of-11 from beyond the arc.
Bates added 14 points, while shooting 5-of-7 overall and 2-of-3 from 3 to go with three rebounds and three assists.
Gray posted a double-double of 10 points and 11 rebounds, the game double-digit scoring performance he posted all season, while Pierce had a near double-double of nine points and seven rebounds.
The Tiger defense held Mississippi Sate to just 36.4 percent shooting from the field and 30.8 percent from 3. The Tigers won points in the paint 30-22, points off turnovers 17-13, second-chance points 12-9 and bench points 46-20.
The win extended the Tigers’ best start in SEC play to 6-2 and continued the feeling that Missouri was on track to become one of the best teams in the league. They bounced up five spots in the AP rankings after sweeping the Mississippi schools, all the way up to No. 15, which was the second-highest ranking of the season. They would reach No. 14 a couple of weeks later after beating Alabama.
The season didn’t end the way people were hoping, but going to Starkville and beating Mississippi State for the first time in a decade seemed to remove a bit of a curse and had the Tigers riding high.
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