How Mizzou basketball's veteran roster can win games early on with its experience

Missouri head basketball coach Dennis Gates is still trying to learn what his team is made of.

On Monday against Southern Indiana, the Tigers carved out a big lead, but things got tight late when the Screaming Eagles made 14 three-point shots.

According to Gates, he could have made coaching changes to stem the tide. Instead, he saw it as a prime opportunity to give MU an early season test.

“What we do as head coaches is try to see how we can benefit and get our team better, without showing everything that we have in our playbook or defensive scheme” Gates said on Wednesday. “I just wanted our guys to navigate certain things and continue to get better.”

The Tigers have a packed early-season schedule, featuring three games in five days starting Friday. Gates said he hoped the non-conference slate would help gel the roster, which only features three players returning from last season.

Fortunately for Missouri, most of the team already has college basketball experience. They’ve been through different situations already, and have learned how to respond accordingly.

“We know how to handle certain things,” MU guard DeAndre Gholston said. “(The Southern Indiana game) got kind of bad, but we know how to handle things, talk to each other the right way instead of being negative and things like that.”

Gholston is one of the players who joined Missouri this season through the transfer portal. He started his college career at Kent State, before spending a season at Tallahassee Community College and then going to Milwaukee last year.

Missouri’s 2022-23 roster only includes two freshmen, one of which Aiden Shaw was the only one to appear in the opening game. The rest are all veterans.

Gholston’s fellow transfer, Tre Gomillion, who followed Gates to Columbia from Cleveland State, agreed with him about the benefits of such an experienced roster.

“Definitely a plus to that,” Gomillion said. “We’ve got great guys, Isiaih Mosley, Noah Carter, Dre Gholston, I could go on and on, but it’s just great to have those guys to know that there's going to be runs, there’s going to be punches thrown, but we can throw punches too. It’s a game of runs, we all know that.”

Another transfer, Nick Honor, who joined Missouri after starting his career at Clemson, said the veterans on the team also can also help out the Tigers in the long term.

“I think the leadership piece is important,” Honor said. “Just letting our guys that are younger know that it’s a long season and you just gotta stay composed through tough times. Just pass on the message to the guys, that’ll help us throughout the season.”

The three-game stretch starts on Friday when Penn visits Mizzou Arena. After that, the Tigers will play Lindenwood on Sunday and Southern Illinois- Edwardsville on Tuesday, both at home.

Gates said he likes seeing tough moments early on in the year, and thinks the trials could help MU toward the end of the season. However, he said he wouldn’t plan to handle a situation like Southern Indiana presented exactly the same way.

“You have to pick and choose,” Gates said. “You can’t premeditate. You have to make those decisions in-game. And in-game I chose not to make certain adjustments that I could have easily made.”

Gates said he’s still looking to learn which players on his team can take a game over, but he built the roster deliberately. He has compared the construction to a puzzle, trying to find players who fit together correctly to build something.

Adversity early on could help with that, especially with so much experience on the roster.

“It was great,” Gholston said of facing the Southern Indiana shooting onslaught. “We’re gonna play bigger and, I hate to say ‘better’, but higher conference teams. We need to know how to handle things like that in the future, so for it to happen first game of the season was great for us.”

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Mizzou basketball: Veteran players help with early schedule challenge