Born to Coach: How Dennis Gates Climbed the Ladder to Mizzou
Ryan Forehan-Kelly was startled to hear his name.
It was Feb. 27, 1999, and Forehan-Kelly’s California basketball team was locked in a tight matchup against Arizona State. Cal led by two points with 22.7 seconds left when Arizona State got whistled for a technical foul. A freshman walk-on, Forehan-Kelly hadn’t played all game and had played only a handful of minutes all season. His coach, Ben Braun, tabbed the team’s freshman point guard to shoot the free throws resulting from the technical. But that player had a banged-up thumb, so he told Braun to insert Forehan-Kelly into the game instead.
That player: new Missouri coach Dennis Gates. Forehan-Kelly shed his warm-ups, made the two free throws and promptly returned to the bench, logging a stat line of two points in zero minutes. Cal went on to win 78-73.
“He’s like, ‘nah, put him in,’” Forehan-Kelly, now an assistant coach for the Brooklyn Nets, said of Gates. “‘He’ll make them.’ We needed two free throws. Long story short, I hit the two free throws. Played zero minutes, hit the two free throws, came out. And we won the game.
“So that’s a funny story, but that shows his dedication to the team. Like, he could have came in there and hit them, too, but his thumb was kind of jacked up, so let’s get this done, next guy on deck.”
Forehan-Kelly shared the anecdote about his former Cal teammate to illustrate the characteristics that have allowed Gates to climb the coaching ladder to Missouri at age 42. Others who know Gates well describe similar qualities. Gates has always had a knack for evaluation, for finding production in unlikely places. He’s a natural leader, prioritizing team success over his own. And while he’s far from a reckless gambler, he’s never been one to “just go with the flow and do what everyone else does,” in Forehan-Kelly’s words.
Now, after Missouri paid Cuonzo Martin $6 million to go away and replaced him with Gates, he’ll try to use those qualities to turn the Tiger program that has seen twice as many 20-loss seasons (four) as NCAA Tournament appearances (two) in the past eight years back into a perennial postseason player. At least one of Gates’ mentors, longtime Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton, believes he’s the right man for the job.
“Dennis checks all the boxes,” Hamilton said. “When I look at jobs, you kind of try to look at a candidate through the eyes of the athletic director of the school and you see what they need. And then you try to analyze who has those characteristics that allow them to go through and work through challenges like Missouri has. … And Dennis checks all the boxes.”
An early instance of Gates zigging where others might zag came during his recruitment. Gates, the starting point guard for a Whitney Young high school team that went 30-1 and won an Illinois state title during his senior year, drew the interest of high-major coaches across the country — including Missouri’s Norm Stewart. When those coaches paid visits, Gates posed them all the same question.
It wasn’t how much playing time would be available or how he would be utilized in the scheme. Coaching was already on Gates’ radar — he said he used to fill notebooks with coaching ideas as young as 18. So instead, he wanted to know whether he could step in right away and be a leader, whether the team had rules against a freshman serving as a captain.
As Gates told it during his introductory press conference on Tuesday, Braun was the only coach who didn’t seem caught off guard. That led Gates to commit to a program halfway across the country that didn’t have its own arena.
“I said, ‘do you have rules and regulations against freshmen becoming captains?’” Gates said. “Yeah, I asked that question. And there was one coach who sat at the edge of his seat toward me. The remainder pushed back and said, ‘what is this kid talking about? What is he talking about?’ … So I thank Ben Braun, who I played for, who sat at the edge of his seat and said ‘I want you to be a leader for me.’ That's why I decided on Cal-Berkeley.”
Gates indeed served as a captain for all four of his seasons at Cal. Asked what he remembers most about his college roommate, Forehan-Kelly immediately mentioned Gates' leadership.
“(Gates has) always been a leader,” Forehan-Kelly said. “Even as freshmen in college. … I really appreciated his courage to jump in the frying pan and be like, no, I’m part of this team, too. And so just ahead of his time with that.”
Even though he had known for a while that he wanted to coach, Gates stumbled into his first job in the profession. After his playing career ended at Cal, Gates interviewed for the head coaching position at Lincoln Park High in Chicago, he told the Bleav in Ball Chicago podcast in 2020. He didn’t get the job. Not long after, he found himself in Los Angeles, rebounding for Quentin Richardson, his high school teammate, then a player for the Clippers. Clippers assistant coach Dennis Johnson and head coach Alvin Gentry noticed Gates, took a liking to him and created a position for him as a player development coach.
His first college job also came through an unusual connection. Gates reached out to Tom Crean, then the coach at Marquette, about joining the Golden Eagles’ staff as a graduate assistant. Crean remembered Gates from his Whitney Young days. At the time, he had been an assistant for Michigan State, leading the Spartans’ recruitment of Richardson. He first noticed Gates when Gates sat out a practice due to injury. He watched from the sidelines while doing his homework.
That stuck with Crean, who noted you don’t see that every day from a Division I-bound basketball player. As a member of Crean’s staff, Gates backed up his studious reputation.
“He was a note-taker, he was a question-asker, he was quiet and introspective,” Crean said of Gates. “He was a very thought-out person. He was not a flippant, say whatever is on his mind, think out loud type of guy. He really, really had an introspection and took things in, and I think the way he processes is really strong.”
Following a season at Marquette, Gates moved to another graduate assistant role at Florida State. There, he met the man who has been perhaps the biggest influence on his coaching career in Hamilton.
It didn’t take Hamilton long to realize he had a rising star on his staff. He said he “never had to ask Dennis to do something twice.” He started assigning Gates responsibilities that would normally be reserved for full-time assistants, such as statistical analysis and tracking the academic progress of players.
The best way Hamilton could describe Gates’ gift was by saying he had the “it-factor.” Hamilton compared him to Kansas coach Bill Self in that way. Self worked under Hamilton as an assistant at Oklahoma State from 1986-1990.
“I remember watching Bill and I said ‘this guy is born to coach,” Hamilton said. “I feel the same way about Dennis. Dennis has that it-factor about him that you just know that he is going to be successful in whatever responsibility you give him.”
Gates only spent one season in Tallahassee as a graduate assistant before Braun hired him as a full-time assistant at California. But Hamilton vowed to bring him back to Florida State whenever he got the chance. That opportunity arose in 2011. That’s when Hamilton started grooming Gates to become a head coach.
Over the course of eight seasons, Hamilton would give Gates a taste of all the responsibilities that came with a head coaching chair. In his introductory press conference Tuesday, Gates thanked Hamilton for “taking the training wheels off.” Hamilton said Gates never encountered a job he couldn’t do.
“Game preparation, independently recruiting, executing the drills in all phases, being a part of the staff meetings to make sure that our organization is tight, being a part of developing the culture, the weight training and conditioning, the running the camp, the speaking engagements with your boosters,” Hamilton said, listing off jobs he gave Gates. “Fortunately for me as a young assistant and a grad assistant, I had those responsibilities, so I give them to my guys. … So Dennis had all those responsibilities, and I could never give him anything that he couldn’t handle.”
More than anything else, Gates made a name for himself at Florida State with his recruiting ability. From 2015 to 2019, the latter half of Gates’ tenure as a Florida State assistant, the Seminoles signed seven players who would go on to be drafted in the NBA. Gates was intimately involved with the recruitment of several, including Jonathan Isaac, the nation’s No. 8 prospect in the class of 2016.
Hamilton credited Gates’ recruiting prowess in part to his skill as a communicator, but said what stood out most was his ability to evaluate players. Never was that more evident than in the case of Mfiondu Kabengele. The Canada native, then 6-foot-6, came to the U.S. to play for Don Bosco Prep in an effort to earn the attention of college coaches. Gates got a tip about him, went to watch him play and offered him his first high-major scholarship. Ultimately, Kabengele grew to 6-foot-10, 250 pounds. After redshirting his first season at Florida State, he averaged 13.2 points and 5.9 rebounds per game in 2018-19, turning into a first-round draft pick.
“One of the biggest challenges, I think, in coaching is being able to evaluate,” Hamilton said. “Evaluate guys who you feel not only have the intelligence academically and the athletic ability, but guys who have that toughness, that ability to go out in certain situations and perform. And I thought with him working with me, I thought that he had those instincts to go out and evaluate the kind of people that he could predict that will grow and mature and be able to be successful within our program, and he’s been right on in so many instances.”
The talent Gates helped bring to Tallahassee played a major role in Florida State advancing to four consecutive NCAA Tournaments from 2017-2021 after four straight years missing out on the Big Dance. It also put him on the radar of Missouri athletics director Desiree Reed-Francois. In 2017, Reed-Francois, then the deputy athletics director at Virginia Tech, started asking around about how the Seminoles's resurgence. The most common answer, she said Tuesday, was Dennis Gates.
“We kept wondering, how is Florida State turning it around so much?” Reed-Francois said. “And I started asking people, and they said ‘Dennis Gates. He is an incredible recruiter, he is the real deal.’”
Reed-Francois wasn't the only administrator to take notice of Gates. In 2019, Gates got offered his first head coaching job. Accepting might have been the biggest risk he's ever taken.
Cleveland State had won just 40 games across the past four seasons. It fired coach Dennis Felton in July of that year, about a month before the start of the fall semester. Felton left behind a program in poor academic standing and with just four scholarship players on the roster.
When new Cleveland State athletics director Scott Garrett reached out to Gates, his coaching peers almost unanimously urged him not to take the job, saying it would be “career suicide.” Gates took it anyway.
“He probably looked at it, it’s a job that very few people wanted, it’s a job that didn’t look good at all, and anything I would do, if I did it the right way, was probably going to look good,” Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Terry Pluto said. “But it just took off.”
Gates’ first season as a head coach didn’t exactly start smoothly. Pluto remembers his first game of the Gates era. He was in the area for something else, saw that Cleveland State was playing and figured he’d stop in to get a look at the new coach. The Vikings trailed 31-5 by the time he found a seat.
Yet Pluto watched Gates remain upbeat and engaged on the sidelines, and his team never stopped playing hard. He remembers telling Garrett “I don’t know if this guy can coach, but you might have something here.”
Indeed, Cleveland State weathered the slow start and got better as Gates’ first year progressed. The Vikings’ 7-10 record in Horizon League play was enough to earn Gates conference coach of the year honors. The following season, he led the Vikings to a 19-8 record, a Horizon League regular-season title and a conference tournament championship. That resulted in the school’s first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2009 and a second straight coach of the year crown for Gates.
Gates demonstrated a couple key characteristics in turning around Cleveland State. He found effective players from non-traditional places. In Pluto’s words, “If you’re going to a yard sale or a rummage sale, bring Dennis.” His roster last season featured four players he recruited from the high school ranks, three junior college products and two Division I transfers — from Appalachian State and Pacific, not well-known players looking to move down a level from the high-major ranks. Gates has already shown his ability to mine the junior-college and mid-major ranks for talent during his first week on the job at Missouri. He landed a commitment from junior college forward Mohamed Diarra on Friday and Milwaukee transfer guard DeAndre Gholston on Saturday.
Gates also adapted to overcome challenges he couldn’t have foreseen when he took the job, most notably the COVID-19 pandemic. When players and coaches were separated during the offseason prior to the 2020-21 season, he asked Crean for ideas to build team and staff chemistry.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a coach that did more to develop his staff during COVID than Dennis,” said Crean. “He was constantly working on developing his staff, with Zoom meetings and bringing speakers in to them and really trying to keep them locked in and learning. And that doesn’t happen every day, that’s hard to do.”
Gates frequently keeps in touch with his mentors, picking their brains for advice about certain situations he’s facing or calling them before making a career move. Both Crean and Hamilton mentioned that about him. But make no mistake, he’s his own person. As Hamilton put it, he sees some similarities between his Florida State teams and Gates’ at Cleveland State, but “you’re not necessarily going to get Florida State Midwest.”
Instead, Gates will continue to combine the wisdom from his coaching elders with the natural leadership ability, evaluation instinct and courage to blaze his own trail that made him a freshman captain at Cal and prompted him to put a little-used walk-on at the free throw line in the final minute of a close game. His whole life, coaches have seen those qualities and told him he would make a good coach one day. So why change now?
“I want you to think about my home visit as a young kid with Ben Braun,” Gates said Tuesday. “I started building my program at the age of 18. And every year, every season, I’ve flipped it and pivoted and seen what I need to change, literally in notebooks. Literally, page by page. I've done that every step of the way.”
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