Tigers pounce early on Gators, claw for win late

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – A week ago, Tennessee coach Rick Barnes sat in the same spot doing his post-game postmortem after Florida teased the No. 1-ranked Volunteers with 30. The loss, Barnes said, would help his team.

This time it was Florida’s coach Todd Golden in the defeat seat late Tuesday night. He didn’t go as far as Barnes, but the way Missouri jumped on its fifth-ranked Gators, built a 19-point lead and survived a furious comeback by the home team to steal an 83-82 road win, just might prove to be a reality kick to the head for the Gators (15-2, 2-2) and all their good feelings of late.

Given the current state of the mighty Southeastern Conference, it better be.

“I don’t think we’ll ever look back on it, but if we’re able to get back to being the tough, competitive team that plays with a chip on our shoulder and is the more physical team – which we have been pretty much every time we played this year — so it’s not going to be the end of the world,” Golden said after the team’s first home loss in more than a year, snapping a 16-game hitting streak at the O’Dome. “We have to. We just have no other choice. If we don’t bounce back and kind of figure that (mentality), we’re going to struggle through the rest of this conference season.”

Tigers backup guard Caleb Grill was hot off the bench scoring a team-high 22 points, most on his six 3-pointers that accounted for more than half of the Tigers’ 11, seven of which came in a first half that represented the Gators’ worst 20 minutes of the season.

Mizzou missed 14 of its first 22 shots, including the seven 3s, to take a 42-23 lead with seven minutes left in the first half, with Grill going 4-for-4 from distance along the way. Florida managed to trim the lead to 10 with five minutes left, but failed to score and turned the ball over four times the rest of the period to trail 50-34 at halftime.

“We just didn’t match their enthusiasm. We didn’t match the physicality,” Golden said. “We allowed them to come into our building and feel 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 holding the Tigers to just 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 and a half — and obviously we didn’t and they got some buckets off of that, 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, five rebounds and three steals. “We have 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 a 3.

For Florida, it was like that the rest of the way. Two steps up, one step back.

Three times UF pulled within three, but couldn’t get the next defensive stop. The last time came when Clayton hit a 3-pointer with 3:38 left, only to have forward Trent Pierce cancel it out with a 3 of his own at the 3:14 mark.

The Mizzou lead was five with 2:38 left when Clayton was fouled shooting a 3. An 87.8 career free throw shooter at the line, Clayton had a chance to pull 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 drained his sixth 3-pointer to make it a seven-point lead. Television replays showed Grill had a toe on the line and that his shot should have been a 2, but UF’s coaching staff wasn’t made aware of it until afterward.

“We didn’t see it,” Golden said. “It’s up to me.”

Whether it would have mattered, no one will know, but Alijah Martins floater with 38.5 seconds to play made it a 79-77 game. However, the Florida defense could not force a turnover, with Mitchell hitting two free throws with 28.2 seconds left and – after a layup from Alex Condon (8 points, 6 rebounds) — Grill hits two more with 5.0 seconds left.

Martin’s 3-pointer at the buzzer accounted for the final one-point margin of victory as the Tigers celebrated their second win over a top-five team this season. Mizzou beat Kansas no. 1 on Dec. 8 in Columbia.

“This was an incredible game, a great atmosphere,” Tigers coach Dennis Gates said of his team, which shot just 33 percent in the second half and missed 11 free throws. “I’m proud of our team. … To be able to be on the road and hold a lead for 37 minutes in this conference is a very difficult thing to do. And our guys were able to do that. That is just one thing. of those things we started hitting shot after shot after shot.”

Way too many for the Gators to recover from.

“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 have a first half like we had, it can’t happen again for the rest of the season.”

Email senior writer Chris Harry at [email protected]