What we heard from Auburn basketball before a big trip to Ole Miss

Can the Tigers follow up a home win with their first true road victory? Here's what to watch for in their visit with the Rebels in Oxford.

Tomorrow morning, we’re going to have a Film Room piece from our basketball expert TF3RG on Filip Jović and his breakout performance against South Carolina.

Until then, here’s a look ahead to Auburn basketball’s Tuesday night showdown at Ole Miss — using a format we’ve gone with for football newsletters. Let’s give it a spin on the hardwood, shall we?

(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)

AUBURN — Auburn’s first of three laps around the chaotic circuit that is the SEC basketball schedule will finish Tuesday night at Ole Miss.

It’s been a stop-start kind of opening to league play for the Tigers. They lost on the road in overtime to rival Georgia before seeing their salvaged home comeback against Texas A&M wiped away on a replay review. After blasting Arkansas for its best-looking win, Auburn fell flat at Missouri before an ugly but effective win over South Carolina.

Auburn is still searching for its first true road win of the season. Those are the victories that can feel like they’re worth double in the conference, and they do more to boost an NCAA Tournament resume than holding serve at home.

First-year head coach Steven Pearl and his staff are racking their brains to figure out what it could take to get their team to step their game up away from Neville Arena.

“In the Georgia game, we just didn’t defend,” Pearl said Monday. “We executed really well offensively, we didn’t defend. Missouri, I thought we defended, but we didn’t execute offensively. So, we gotta find a middle ground here, where we’re defending and executing. … It’s tough, because you don’t want to change up your routine too much. But, at the same time, we gotta find a way to change something on the road.

“So we’re kind of exploring some things that we might change up in our preparation. But I think for us, more importantly, it’s about kind of drawing to what we did do well and didn’t do well in the two previous SEC games — and how we gotta avoid those things.”

The start of that second lap of SEC play might be Auburn’s most challenging game all conference schedule long: A Saturday road game at Florida, the defending national champion that’s now looking like the league’s best team again. Auburn still hasn’t won in Gainesville since 1996.

And, in a way, that’s what makes Tuesday night’s trip to Ole Miss even bigger. Like Missouri last week, it looks like a relatively even matchup in a road game. It could grow into Quad 1 status, depending on what Ole Miss does the rest of the way.

Considering that and the fact that Ole Miss has won three straight games after its own 0-2 start to SEC action, it’s not that hard for Auburn to focus on trying to get a 10th straight win in the series over Ole Miss.

“We've had a lot of ups and downs this year,” point guard Tahaad Pettiford said Monday. “So going and getting these two — especially these two — would be especially big wins for us. I feel like getting those would push the momentum to where we need it to go and get guys in the right headspace and get us going.”

For more on Tuesday night’s matchup against Ole Miss and where Auburn basketball is as it inches closer to the midway point of conference play, here’s a rundown of everything we heard and saw from Pearl and Co. before they left for Oxford: