Mizzou men’s basketball’s rollercoaster of a season ended in the first round of the NCAA Tournament Friday night. The No. 10 Tigers fell 80-66 to the No. 7 Miami Hurricanes in front of a psuedo-home crowd in St. Louis.
The loss perfectly summed up Mizzou’s season: flashes of brilliance paired with splashes of the opposite. Inconsistency plagued the Tigers all season, and put the nail in the coffin by stealing another game at the Enterprise Center, where Mizzou always felt a step behind.
Mizzou had a number of rock-solid performances against Miami — junior guard Anthony Robinson II scored 11 points on an efficient 4-for-6 shooting from the field and 3-for-4 from the 3-point line, paired with a team-high three steals and five assists.
Jayden Stone was on all night as well, scoring 21 points and leading the team with six rebounds. Even Mark Mitchell, the Tigers’ leading scorer who didn’t make a field goal until the 11:57 mark in the second half, finished with 19 points, five assists and a career-high three 3-pointers.
The problem is, to go along with every good Mizzou outing, there was an equally bad one. T.O. Barrett, Jacob Crews and Trent Pierce shot a combined 2-for-22 in 61 minutes on the floor against Miami, and contributed just seven points, all of which came from Pierce.
The real difference in the matchup came on the glass. Mizzou was known as a physically dominant team all season long, but Miami one-upped the Tigers all night.
The Hurricanes outrebounded Mizzou 46-30 in the matchup, and held a 16-7 advantage on the offensive glass. Miami took advantage of its dominance on the boards, scoring a game-altering 19 points on second-chance opportunities. For a Mizzou team that was down for nearly the entire game, the second-chance opportunities were back-breaking.
“Those rebounds almost, I would say, gave them more energy than the points themselves,” Pierce said.
Miami’s half-court offense didn’t take off until the second half, a reflection of a solid Tiger defensive plan early on. Take away the offensive rebounds, and Mizzou head coach Dennis Gates thought the game could have turned out much differently.
“It’s not about what they were doing, we were getting stops,” Gates said. “It’s just you can’t go two possessions in one trip, and that’s where those percentages got the best of us.”
It was a slog early on for both sides, as just nine combined points were scored in the first 5 minutes. The Tigers kept the score close with a couple of timely 3-pointers, but Miami slowly started to pull away as the opening period dragged on. The Hurricanes outrebounded Mizzou 11-3 in the first half and converted that discrepancy into 12 second-chance points.
Miami increased its lead to double digits at 27-17 with 3 minutes left, also marking the last time the Hurricanes scored in the first half. The Tigers, who hadn’t scored in over five minutes, rattled off a 9-0 run, bringing the score to 27-26 and snatching the momentum going into the break. Mitchell and Robinson fueled the run for Mizzou, scoring four and five points.
Mitchell’s four first-half points came in the form of free throws, as the Tigers’ leading scorer was held to zero field goals in the opening period on 0-for-3 shooting. His first points of the night came with 2:54 left in the half, and also signified Mizzou’s first free throws of the game. Mitchell’s four trips to the line were the Tigers’ only of the half, a big cause of their offensive struggles.
Stone kept Mizzou afloat to start the second half, scoring eight straight points by himself over a three-minute stretch to keep it a one-possession contest. Triples started dropping for Miami, however, allowing the Hurricanes to take control of a 49-43 lead. Miami caught fire from deep in the second half, shooting 7-12 on 3-pointers and preventing the Tigers from hanging on to any kind of energy.
Mizzou reacted with a Robinson triple followed by a Stone and-1 to tie the game up at 49. The Tigers took a quick 54-52 lead after a Mitchell triple with just under eight minutes to play, but couldn’t hold on to it for more than a few possessions. An ensuing 11-0 run by the Hurricanes put them back up 63-54 with four minutes left, and forced the Tigers into playing catch up as time winded down.
“We had a few mistakes and they hit timely shots,” Barrett said. “And that kind of turned the game around.”
Three-straight jumpers put Miami up 74-62 with 1:29 left on the clock, giving the Hurricanes their largest lead of the game and all but shutting the doors on Mizzou’s season. As the final seconds ticked off the clock, Mizzou’s dance dwindled.
Mizzou finished the 2025-26 campaign 20-13, with a Southeastern Conference record of 10-8. While not the ending that the Tigers hoped for, Mizzou didn’t go down without a fight against Miami, something the players and coaches alike see as a positive outlook.
“We felt like we could win it until the very end,” Barrett said. “It just didn’t go our way.”
