How much has SEC basketball changed? Just look at Auburn and South Carolina.

The Tigers and the Gamecocks will tangle Wednesday in a critical game for the SEC title race. It's a sign of how far the league has come.

Auburn HC Bruce Pearl and South Carolina HC Lamont Paris (Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)

Almost 13 months ago, Auburn played South Carolina in Columbia. The Tigers raced out to an early lead and were up by 17 points at halftime. Johni Broome scored 27 points against a completely overmatched frontcourt in an 81-66 victory.

That South Carolina team finished the regular season with an 11-21 record. The Gamecocks were by far the lowest-rated SEC team on KenPom at No. 221, with the next-closest being Georgia at No. 154. The star player on that struggling South Carolina team, local 5-star G.G. Jackson, left early for the NBA Draft.

Even though South Carolina managed to escape the basement of the SEC with a 4-14 league mark last season, expectations for the Gamecocks in Year 2 under Lamont Paris were quite low. South Carolina was picked to finish dead last in the SEC at Media Days.

Fast-forward to Wednesday, when South Carolina will arrive in Auburn as one of the hottest teams in all of college basketball.

The Gamecocks are 21-3, sporting a six-game winning streak. Instead of being at the bottom of the conference, they are tied with Alabama for first place. South Carolina has a tough stretch to finish the regular season, but it’s firmly in an SEC title race that very few, if any, would have expected it to be in just a couple of months ago.

“This is what we work for as coaches, to try to get our programs to be relevant (and) competitive in our league,” Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl said Tuesday. “Coach Paris, in my mind — it would be hard to think of anybody else that would be the coach of the year in our league. … He and his staff have done a tremendous job of rebuilding and putting together a really, really competitive roster.”

Wednesday night will mark the 50th time that Auburn has played South Carolina in men’s basketball. It will also be the first time the two teams have met as ranked opponents — Auburn at No. 13, and South Carolina at No. 11.

If that sentence sounds familiar, it’s because Auburn has already done this once this season. Prior to their first matchup last month, Auburn and Ole Miss had never played each other as ranked teams.

“Very much like what I told the coaches at Ole Miss, I'll tell the coaches at South Carolina tomorrow: ‘It took me three years to do what's taken you guys maybe 18 months or a couple years,’” Pearl said.

Welcome to the new reality in SEC men’s basketball.

When Pearl was hired in 2014 to resurrect an Auburn program that was among the worst in major-conference basketball, the conference as a whole was a completely different landscape.

In the 2013-14 season, just before Pearl’s arrival, the SEC’s KenPom rating was last, by a considerable margin, among what was then the six power conferences: the Big 12, the Big Ten, the ACC, the Pac-12 and the Big East. The conference got just three teams into the NCAA Tournament that season.

A decade later, the SEC is currently the No. 3 conference in the country, close behind the Big 12 and the Big East. When Auburn won the league title two seasons ago, the SEC was the No. 2 conference in college basketball.

The SEC got eight teams into the NCAA Tournament field last season. Right now, Bracket Matrix predicts what would be a league record-breaking nine teams to get invited to the Big Dance.

“It speaks to the commitment that the SEC has in all sports, men’s basketball being absolutely no different,” Pearl said. “The South Carolina women are still ranked No. 1 in the country, and so they fill that building all the time. And now the South Carolina men are starting to draw, just like every place else in our league.

“A great example of the parity that exists in college basketball.”