How Dennis Gates brought Mizzou basketball back and restored excitement back in a single year
Dennis Gates was trying something different. The night before the Missouri football team nearly upset Georgia, Gates and his Tiger basketball squad were ready for Mizzou Madness.
The season kickoff event wasn’t held in Mizzou Arena. Instead, it happened on an outdoor court set up near the MU campus columns on the Francis Quadrangle. As Cleveland Cavaliers public address announcer Ahmaad Crump called their names, Missouri’s players took the court, participating in a three-point contest, a dance-off and, along with former MU head coach Norm Stewart, witnessing a dunk contest for attending children.
The event drew a good crowd, excited to cheer on the Tigers and see their new head coach make a public appearance. In turn, Gates was happy to see them.
“I’m just excited that we had the opportunity to do it right here in our quad, right in from of the columns,” Gates said afterward. “For our fans. We do not build the program alone.”
The new head man, who took the Missouri job after his last stop at Cleveland State, had lofty goals for the program he was now in charge of. From the very beginning, he spoke of his intention to have Missouri playing on April 1 and 3 in Houston, the dates and location of the Final Four.
That didn’t happen for the 2022-23 Tigers. They were upset by No. 15-seeded Princeton in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Still, from the 12-win season Missouri endured through in 2021-22, to the sold-out arenas cheering on a 25-win team, Gates brought the Tigers back to prominence and to the cusp of its first Sweet Sixteen since the 2009 season by March 22, 2023, just one calendar year since his hiring on March 22, 2022.
As the fog machine smoke cleared and fans headed for their cars on the October night, many of them were hoping to see improvement but didn’t expect the year to go as well as it did. But Gates did.
And so did his players.
"This group of guys really glued together instantly, as soon as we stepped on campus” returning forward Kobe Brown said before MU’s first game. “That’s a plus, but I feel like every day we’re all holding each other accountable.”
'That’s a sign’
Mizzou Arena and the Tigers sputtered to start the season. Before the season opener against Southern Indiana, the game was delayed when the lights wouldn’t come back on following starter introductions.
Then, the Screaming Eagles gave the Tigers all they could handle. The offensive showcase ended in a 97-91 victory for MU but was hardly the mid-major cupcake warm up fans were expecting.
Still, Gates was unphased.
“It’s a learning experience for our guys,” he said. “We’re going to learn and get things done.”
Gates was also sure to thank the fans in attendance. 10,723 bodies were announced, which would remain the high-water mark until the next month.
The Tigers were likely hurt at the turnstiles by fans who were still anemic from the 2021-22 campaign. After MU beat the brakes off its early season competition, plus won on the road at Wichita State, they were ready to return.
15,061 packed into a sold-out Mizzou Arena for the return of the Border War rivalry with Kansas. MU lost that game handily, but fans apparently liked what they saw, as they continued to pack the house, leading to seven sellouts.
After the 2021-22 Tigers struggled to draw any semblance of a good crowd, the fans returning was a tangible difference. MU averaged 11,571 fans per game, up from just 6,168 for 2021-22, and the first time average attendance hit five digits since 2018-19.
“We sometimes pull up late night, night before the game and there’s Antlers sleeping outside, that’s a sign,” Gates said after the Iowa State game. “That’s a sign. An hour and a half before the game I can hear footsteps as I sit in my office of fans rushing in. That’s a sign.”
Part of Gates’ play to appeal to the lost fans was encouraging his players to become community figures. He made sure they were ready to interact with the public, talk to the fans who would fill Mizzou Arena to see them play.
He even actively told fans to talk to his players if they ran across them outside of basketball, looking to create a bond between team and community. After Missouri’s final regular season game against Ole Miss, a sellout on a senior night, Brown said the successful effort held significant meaning for him throughout the year.
“The fan engagement, the engagement we have in the community, just the smiles we put on everyone’s faces,” Brown said. “That’s mostly the biggest part for me.”
'A lot of better days’
Part of the explanation for excitement returning to Missouri basketball was players and coaches engaging with the community. The other part was winning.
The latter part was less expected. Early could see Gates and company making an effort to bring them back, and engage with the history of the program, including his ability to name every MU coach starting with Norm Stewart at the drop of a hat.
They also saw the Tigers get voted by the media as the likely No. 11 finisher in the SEC. Lindy’s college basketball preview magazine took it even further, picking Missouri 13th and noting that the squad was relying on “A lot of dudes from Cleveland State.”
While the roster assessment was technically accurate, Gates had faith in how he’d built the team.
“You have to have pieces of a puzzle and the pieces of the puzzle all have to fit together,” Gates said. “Sometimes that comes down to personality and also skill, but also the disposition. And I know for a fact that the connectivity of Tre Gomillion, D’Moi Hodge, Mabor Majak and Ben Sternberg (the Cleveland State transfers). They allow our team thus far to build in confidence, but also have peer coaching.”
That connectivity showed up all season. From the returning star Brown, to the Cleveland Staters, to other portal additions like DeAndre Gholston (Milwaukee), Nick Honor (Clemson), Sean East (Logan Community College) and Noah Carter (Northern Iowa), to the lone scholarship freshman Aidan Shaw, the Tigers were quickly up to speed with each other, on and off the court.
At least from the outside, the group appeared to be a deeply connected team, exemplified by how players would sometimes remove themselves from games if they thought the best lineup didn’t include them, and by how they seemed to wrap their arms around Isiaih Mosley, who missed large stretches of the season due to undisclosed personal issues.
And they were fun. The Tigers averaged 78.9 points per game, up from 65.5 the prior season. Rather than Brown being the lone threat, Missouri could get it scoring from anywhere in the lineup on a given night.
Gates also kept developing the players on his roster. Notably, Mohamed Diarra and Mabor Majak, who racked up DNPs toward the start of the season, contributed in big games down the stretch.
Those two certainly helped the cause, but MU would still usually get outrebounded. However, Gates had the Tigers playing a style where they would get possessions back other ways.
“Anyone can look at the numbers and say we got outrebounded,” Gates said after the Tigers beat Vanderbilt in January. “But ultimately you have to be able to hold that as your only negative. If we had gotten outrebounded and given up a negative assist-to-turnover ratio, we would double up the possessions that they versus we have.”
Among the chief reasons the Tigers were able to get possessions back was Hodge. The guard from the British Virgin Islands broke MU’s all-time record for steals in a single season, finishing with 91.
He also starred on offense, giving the Tigers a three-point threat. Hodge could make shots in big-time moments, which ended up as one of the team’s strengths across the board.
With Hodge, Gholston, Honor, a much-improved-from-three Brown and others all stepping up late in games, Missouri’s veteran roster shined late in close contests.
“We do a lot of practice situations to help us get ready for things like this,” Gholston said during the postseason. “And we’re an older team, we’ve been through a lot of things in our careers, high school, college, JuCo, it’s prepared us for things like now.”
In the end, the Tigers were upset by Princeton. It wasn’t how anyone surrounding the team envisioned the year’s finish.
But in the big picture, the 2022-23 Missouri squad reignited the excitement surrounding the program, winning over MU fans and restoring the on-court product to prominence. The future of the program looks bright, with plenty of talent likely to return for next season, and even Brown having a chance at another year of eligibility.
And in the meantime, from Gholston’s two half-court game winners to Hodge’s steals record to every game Brown took over in crunch time, the happy memories will remain.
“We had some not-so-good days,” Brown said of seasons past, following Missouri’s SEC tournament semifinal loss to Alabama. “And this year we had a lot of better days. I’m blessed to have all these guys in my life. Nobody thought we would be where we are now, and although we didn’t win it, we also proved a lot of people wrong.”
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: How Dennis Gates brought Mizzou basketball back in just one year
