GAINESVILLE, Fla. – One week ago, Tennessee coach Rick Barnes sat in the very same spot doing his post-game postmortem after Florida drilled the No. 1-ranked Volunteers by 30. The lopsided loss, Barnes said, would help his team.
This time, it was Florida coach Todd Golden in the defeat seat late Tuesday night. He didn't go as far as Barnes, but the way Missouri jumped on his fifth-ranked Gators, built a 19-point lead and survived a furious comeback by the home team to steal an 83-82 road victory just may turn out to be a reality kick in the head for the Gators (15-2, 2-2) amid all their good feels of late.
Given the current state of the mighty Southeastern Conference, it better be.
"I don't think we'll ever look at it fondly, but if we're able to get back to being the gritty, competitive team that plays with a chip on our shoulder and is the more physical team – which we've been pretty much every time we played this year – then it won't be the end of the world," Golden said after the team's first home loss in more than a year, snapping a 16-game streak at the O'Dome. "We have to. We just have no other choice. If we don't bounce back and kind of find that [mentality], we will struggle through the rest of this conference season."
Tigers backup guard Caleb Grill was hot off the bench in scoring a team-high 22 points, mostly on his six 3-pointers that represented more than half the Tigers' 11. Seven of those 11 came in a first half when the Gators surrendered 58-percent shooting and played their worst 20 minutes of the season.
Mizzou dropped 14 of its first 22 shots, including those seven 3s, to take a 42-23 lead with seven minutes to play in the first half, with Grill going 4-for-4 from distance along the way. Florida managed to trim to the lead to 10 inside five minutes remaining, but failed to score and turned the ball over four times the rest of the period to trail 50-34 at intermission.
"We just did not match their enthusiasm. We didn't match their physicality," Golden said. "We allowed them to come into our building and get comfortable, which just doesn't happen very often."
UF, meanwhile, looked uncomfortable. The Gators turned it over eight times in the first half, leading to 10 Mizzou points, while scoring no points off the Tigers mere three turnovers, the first of which didn't come until nearly 18 minutes into the game.
"Our goal is to stay under 12 turnovers – under six a half – and obviously we didn't do that and they got some buckets off of it, so it's kind of like giving the other team points," Florida senior guard Walter Clayton Jr. said after leading all scorers with 28 points, plus five rebounds and three steals. "We've got to be better that way."
They were better that way in the second half, but had a lot of ground to make up. The Gators scored the first five points of the period to cut the lead to five, but then Grill hit another 3.
For Florida, it was like that the rest of the way. Two steps up, one step back.
Three times, UF drew within three, but could not get that next defensive stop. Clayton hit a 3-pointer with 3:38 to go, only to have forward Trent Pierce cancel it out with 3 of his own at the 3:14 mark.
The Mizzou lead was five, with 2:38 to go, when Clayton was fouled shooting a 3. An 87.8 career free-throw shooter at the line, Clayton had a chance to draw the Gators within two, but missed the first and second, leaving them to settle for a four-point deficit. UF was just 21-for-31 from the line for the night (67.7 percent).
Eighteen seconds later, Grill dropped his sixth 3-pointer to make it a seven-point lead. Television replays showed that Grill had a toe on the line and that his shot should have been a 2, but the UF coaching staff wasn't made aware of that until afterward.
"We didn't see it," Golden said. "That's on me."
Whether it would have mattered, no one will know, but Alijah Martin's floater with 38.5 seconds to play made it a 79-77 game. The Florida defense could not force a turnover, though, with Mitchell hitting two free throws with 28.2 seconds left and – after a layup from Alex Condon (8 points, 6 rebounds) -- Grill calmly hitting two more with 5.0 seconds to go.
Martin's logo-range 3-pointer at the buzzer accounted for the final one-point margin of victory, with the Tigers celebrating their second win over a top-five team this season. Mizzou beat No. 1 Kansas on Dec. 8 at Columbia.
"This was an unbelievable game, a great atmosphere," Tigers coach Dennis Gates said after his team shot just 33 percent and went 9-for-18 from the free-throw line in the second half and still got out of town with the win. "I'm proud of our team. … To be able to be on the road, and hold the lead for 37 minutes in this conference, is a very difficult thing to do. And our guys were able to do it. It's just one of those things, we started hitting shot after shot after shot."
Way too many for the Gators to overcome.
A week after clobbering No. 1 Tennessee 73-43, Missouri scored 50 in the first half -- and 40 more for the game -- on the same Florida home floor.
"Yeah, it's definitely not a good feeling, but it's definitely something you can learn from," UF senior guard Will Richard said. "You can't take nights off in this league and having a first half like we had, it can't happen again the rest of the season."
Email senior writer Chris Harry at chrish@gators.ufl.edu
