Why Gates was the man for Mizzou
It was roughly five years ago, when Desiree Reed-Francois wasn’t yet an athletics director and Dennis Gates wasn’t yet a head basketball coach, that Reed-Francois first heard Gates’ name.
At the time, Reed-Francois was the deputy athletics director at Virginia Tech. Elsewhere in the ACC, Florida State has resurrected its basketball program. After failing to reach the NCAA Tournament in four straight seasons, the Seminoles went 26-9 and earned a No. 3 seed in the 2017 tournament, and then made an Elite Eight run in 2018.
So, Reed-Francois started asking around: How had Leonard Hamilton and Florida State rebounded? One name kept coming up.
“I started asking people, and they said ‘Dennis Gates,’” Reed-Francois recalled Tuesday. “‘He is an incredible recruiter, he is the real deal.’”
Shortly thereafter, Reed-Francois would be named the athletics director at UNLV. In 2019, Gates got hired as the head coach at Cleveland State. But Reed-Francois continued to follow his career. So when Reed-Francois and Missouri made the decision to part ways with Cuonzo Martin following a 12-21 season, Gates was immediately near the top of her list.
A week into the search, Reed-Francois zeroed in on Gates. After the Board of Curators voted to formally approve his hire Tuesday morning, Gates was introduced as the 20th head coach in Missouri basketball history at Mizzou Arena Tuesday afternoon.
“When this search came open, we had kind of tiers of coaches that we were going to be looking at, and he was in that top tier,” Reed-Francois said. “We spoke with some really talented coaches in person and on Zoom, and he was completely — he earned it.”
Speaking to a crowd of family members, donors, other Missouri coaches and fans that filled the Missouri practice gym, Reed-Francois listed the reasons she ultimately hired Gates. It became clear that what separated Gates from the host of coaches who are making the jump from the mid-major ranks to the SEC this offseason was his track record of success both as a high-major assistant and at the head of a mid-major program.
Gates first met Hamilton when longtime basketball coach George Raveling, who Gates called his mentor, introduced the two of them. Gates, a couple years removed from playing college basketball at California, was looking for a job as a graduate assistant. Hamilton quickly realized Gates was not your average GA.
“I brought him in as a graduate assistant, and his confidence level, his ability to communicate with our players, to engage them mentally and emotionally, to help them physically go ahead and do what they’re supposed to do, I was very impressed,” Hamilton said Tuesday morning. “I mean, I gave him responsibilities as a grad assistant in my program that normally is reserved for more experienced people.”
After one year in that role, Gates returned to California as a full-time assistant. He then bounced around to Northern Illinois and Nevada before an assistant position opened up at Florida State. Hamilton joked that he “put him in a headlock and told him he had no choice” but to join his staff.
Across the next eight years, Gates helped recruit the talent that would lead to four straight NCAA Tournament berths for Florida State (which would have been five had the 2020 postseason not been canceled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic). He played a role in landing Jonathan Isaac, the nation’s No. 8 prospect who went on to be selected sixth overall in the 2017 NBA Draft. Hamilton said Gates also identified Mfiondu Kabengele, an under-recruited seven-footer who redshirted his first season on campus before putting together such a strong 2017-18 campaign that he, too, was drafted in the first round.
Reed-Francois listed Gates’ recruiting chops as a major reason for his hire. Hamilton praised Gates’ ability to form connections on the recruiting trail, but said his greatest strength is his ability to evaluate prospects.
“Dennis has the ability to evaluate,” Hamilton said. “And to be very honest with you, sometimes that’s a lot more difficult than you would think. You’ve got to be able to anticipate — not necessarily evaluate — where a guy is. You have to be able to evaluate his character, his personality, his body language, his ability to communicate. You’ve got to be able to project what he's going to become. And that's not an easy thing. Sometimes you go see guys who score a lot of points and everybody thinks that guy's gonna be a great player. That's an instinctive skill that we all don't have.”
While Gates was helping Hamilton get Florida State back on track, Hamilton was grooming him to become a head coach. Gates said he didn’t realize it at the time, but Hamilton allowing him to lead scouting reports or speak at press conferences was his way of “taking the training wheels off.”
“Leonard Hamilton often moved to the side and allowed me to lead in moments that prepared me and gave me the confidence to be here,” Gates said. “From the scouting, from the responsibilities daily to even the interactions to our community, fan base, boosters, alumni and administration. He allowed me to do that on his watch.”
Gates’ first head coaching opportunity came calling at what seemed like the worst possible time. It was July of 2019. The Florida State roster was loaded, the best it had looked in Hamilton’s 18 seasons. (Florida State would wind up ranked No. 4 nationally when the season was curtailed.) Classes were set to begin in a few weeks. After Cleveland State abruptly fired Dennis Felton following two 20-loss seasons, the administration contacted Gates.
His friends in the coaching industry said he was committing career suicide, Gates said Tuesday. Cleveland State had just three returning players on its roster. It had gone 40-89 across the past four years. But he took the job. And while the Vikings struggled to an 11-21 record during his first season, Gates earned Horizon League coach of the year honors for managing to win seven league games.
The following season, Cleveland State went 19-8, winning the conference regular season and tournament titles and earning its first NCAA Tournament berth since 2009. He followed that up with another regular season crown this year. Reed-Francois said the turnaround he engineered at Cleveland State resonated during the search process.
“They didn’t really have a staff, they only had three or four student-athletes, and he turned them into a champion,” Reed-Francois said. “They went to the NCAA Tournament, they went to the NIT, he was two-time coach of the year. So I knew he was respected by his colleagues, and I loved the way that he built it.”
It wasn’t just that Gates won in a seemingly impossible situation that attracted Reed-Francois to him, but how his teams did it. She noted that he “plays an exciting brand of basketball.” Cleveland State ranked second in the Horizon League in offensive efficiency last season and fourth in offensive tempo. Gates described his system as "fast-paced offense meets fast-pressure defense."
Reed-Francois was also impressed with the innovative approach he outlined during interviews with the search committee.
“He plays an innovative, modernized game of basketball,” Reed-Francois said. “We wanted someone who wanted to embrace analytics. Innovation is one of our core values in the athletic department, and that was important to us. Who plays a fun brand of basketball but is going to use modern techniques and analytics to get the job done.”
Reed-Francois also gushed about Gates as a leader and mentor figure. She assured that he’s a coach parents will want to send their children to play for After all, her own son, Jackson Francois, is set to walk onto the Missouri basketball team next fall.
Gates repeatedly emphasized the importance of connecting with players and supporting them beyond basketball. He doesn’t see a trade-off between coaching his players hard on the court and supporting them off it. He said his players play hard because of the rapport he forms with them.
“We have to be able to be their psychologist or psychiatrist,” Gates said. “We have to be able to be there, that person that they can lean on. … They play hard because they know one day they'll invite me to their wedding, I'm sitting behind their parents. They all know one day when it's time to retire, that they'll call me and say ‘coach, what do you think?’ That trust is important.”
That said, Gates is realistic. He understands that he didn’t get hired solely to graduate players and prepare them for life beyond basketball. Missouri made clear that isn’t enough by moving on from Martin.
Gates said he first learned about the Missouri program when Norm Stewart recruited him out of Whitney Young high school in Chicago. Twenty-five years later, his challenge is to be the coach who finally restores the program to the success it experienced under Stewart: perennially making NCAA Tournament appearances and occasionally winning conference titles. Gates believes he’s up to the task.
“I know the business and profession I’m in,” he said. “I realize that. I’m not running from it. I'm here to tussle with it. I'm here to fight against our opponents. Not just in the SEC, but in the country. I understand that. I understand the expectation, because my success can open doors for other people. I understand that. So the word is not just national championship, is not just a SEC championship, it’s also to watch our kids walk across the stage. That's what it's also about.”
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