BATON ROUGE - The No. 22 LSU Tigers basketball stay undefeated in SEC play after beating Ole Miss 73-63 in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on Saturday.

Javonte Smart led the way for the Tigers as he scored 13 of his season-high 21 points in the last 16 minutes of the game.

.@JavonteSmart scored 21 points for the third time this season!#ykdavibe pic.twitter.com/HxATuj0vdp

— LSU Basketball (@LSUBasketball) February 1, 2020

With the win, LSU improves to 17-4 and 8-0 in the conference to keep the no. 1 seed in the SEC. This is the Tigers best start in 39 years.

Marlon Taylor also added in 13 points and 11 rebounds

LSU Head Coach Will Wade

Opening statement…
“I thought we played a great first half. I thought we came out with great energy, great enthusiasm. Second half, obviously, wasn’t as good. I thought the way we ended the first half hurt us. We let them go on a 4-0 run. We had some turnovers. In the second half we weren’t nearly as good, but I thought Javonte (Smart) made plays when we needed him to. I thought Marlon (Taylor) made some huge plays and some big plays as well. It was a good team win. At the end of the day we’re 8-0 in the league. I think it’s the first time in 40 years, something like that. It’s obviously not very easy to do and you’ve got to give credit to our guys. We have to play better. We’re going to have to play more consistently moving forward. We have a big week ahead, starting with Vanderbilt on the road.”

On the early second-half woes…
“We missed a few layups at the beginning. This was different. The Alabama game, we shot a bunch of threes to start the second half. This game we still shot a bunch of shots inside. We missed some shots inside. Our ball-screen coverage – we let them get a little more comfortable where they had some cleaner looks to start the second half. I think it was a combination of both, but give Mississippi credit. They could have folded and not played well in the second half, but they came out ready to play.”

On if this year’s team is similar to last year’s…
“We’ll see. We’ve got to keep our stride. You look at it – three of our four losses are by two points and we had the lead in the last minute of every single one of those two-point losses. We’ve obviously won a lot of close games too so all that stuff just evens out. It just so happened it evened out in conference for us instead of out of conference. We have a long way to go. If we want to have a special season, we’ve got to be more dominant on both sides of the ball. We’ve got to value each possession more. We’ve got to be cleaner with what we’re doing. We’re in a good spot, but there’s a lot of time left, there’s a lot of season left and we’ve got to continue to improve and continue to get better. I think time will tell, basically, how much everything mirrors each other.”

Up next the Tigers travel on the road to face off against Vanderbilt on Wedensday February 5th at 8pm on the SEC Network.