Cafeoutdoors.com: Missouri BB

Long read but 1 or 2 here might enjoy it as I did.

From the NYT's.

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Dennis Gates is wearing a Lululemon hoodie with a hole in the right elbow. Gray sweats. Gray high tops. Same outfit he wore yesterday, same one he’ll wear tomorrow. On game days, Missouri’s coach is always in the same black suit, a gold tie and the shoes he wore to his introductory news conference five and a half years ago for his first head coaching job, at Cleveland State.

It’s not superstition. Gates does not want to waste time or energy on what to wear each morning. Fittingly, he wears the same face every day, too. Prefers that you cannot tell whether he won or lost. “That’s my temperament,” he said, “and I remain steadfast in it.”

And a year ago, boy did it come in handy.

After a successful first year — 25 wins, the program’s first NCAA Tournament victory since 2010, a fourth-place finish in the SEC — Gates’ honeymoon phase at Missouri came to an abrupt halt in Year 2 with the program’s first winless conference season (0-18) since 1908.

No matter the era, few coaches survive not winning a conference game. The last coach before Gates to go winless in the SEC — Bryce Drew at Vanderbilt in 2019 — was fired. A.M. Ebright was the coach of those 1907-08 Tigers, Missouri basketball’s second year of existence and first in a conference (the Missouri Valley). That was also Ebright’s only season ever as a head college basketball coach; he coached the University of "HomeofToto" baseball team the next year, then moved to Wichita to practice law.

“I don’t know of an 0-18 coach that ain’t got fired,” Gates said.

But Gates just kept operating how he had in his first season, leaning on a line from one of his favorite poems, Rudyard Kipling’s “If”, as his mantra:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same

There were excuses to be made — and we’ll get to those — but Gates kept his cool throughout the year. No blowups. No finger pointing. Same tone. Same rhetoric.

“He is the most even-keeled person emotionally that I’ve ever seen,” said Gabe DeArmond, who has covered Missouri athletics since 2003. “When things are not good, it frustrates people that he isn’t more angry. But then when things are good, he insists they’re not playing well.”

Now things are good: Gates’ third Mizzou team is 19-6, No. 15 in the AP poll and 8-4 in an SEC being discussed as the strongest conference ever. Only two high-major programs have made the NCAA Tournament following a winless conference season — 1987-88 Maryland and 2020-21 Iowa State.

In the transfer portal era, it’s possible to flip a roster quickly, as programs like Michigan and Louisville have shown this season. Missouri has not shied away from that strategy, with five transfer players contributing, but at those other places, there’s a new head coach in town, easily able to run off the guys who were on the court for the previous season’s losses.

Instead of stripping the program back down to its studs, Gates held on to his core: Five players in his current rotation, including three starters, are holdovers. The team that will welcome in No. 4 Alabama on Wednesday night has no shortage of memories from how far it has come in a short time to be jockeying for position with the best teams in the country.

“We had to be a participant in our own rescue,” said Tamar Bates, one of those returners. “Literally in real time we’re seeing ourselves write our names in history books.”

The Tigers’ upset of rival "HomeofToto" in December offered a glimpse at the potential of the team that has held its own in a brutal SEC. (Jay Biggerstaff / Imagn Images)
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss

In June, Gates told his staff members to switch offices, essentially move out and move back in. They even put up fresh coats of paint. “They looked at me like I was crazy,” Gates said.

The head coach kept his office but rearranged the furniture. He wanted everyone to reprogram their brains into thinking the 2024-25 season would be Year 1.

“Reset. No residue,” Gates said. “If we’re going to ask the returning players, which was the core guys, to do it, we have to do it.”

First, a refresher. Last season did happen, and the excuses were plentiful. “Jason,” Gates shouted to sports information director Jason Veniskey, sitting at the back of his office. “Do you have the number of injuries that we had?”

The 2023-24 Tigers had injured or sick players miss a combined total of 111 games.

“We didn’t have the closers,” Gates said. “Everybody had to play out of position at that point.”

For his sanity, Gates was convinced his processes were good processes. He was told by peers Cleveland State was a bad job when he inherited it in 2019 coming off four straight losing seasons, and he had the Vikings in the NCAA Tournament in Year 2. He flipped Missouri even faster.

Had they been healthy, the consensus inside the walls at Mizzou Arena goes, the Tigers would have been competitive in ’23-24. In hindsight, there were some holes in the frontcourt, but the roster had a chance. John Tonje, who is now leading No. 11 Wisconsin in scoring amid a first-team All-America campaign, would have been the star, but he played only 78 minutes over nine games because of a foot injury, and 3-point marksman Caleb Grill missed all but nine games with a wrist injury.

During summer workouts, Grill even told assistant Kyle Smithpeters that it was one of the best teams he’d been on, and he’d been on back-to-back tourney teams at Iowa State. In the preseason, the Tigers were up 17 with three minutes to go when they pulled their starters in a secret scrimmage against Marquette, which went on to make the Sweet 16.

But once it started going south…

“You do what most coaches do: You question everything you’ve ever known that’s worked,” Smithpeters said. “You try to change and it still doesn’t work and you basically lose your (bleep) mind. And Dennis did a great job of not losing his mind.”

Gates took satisfaction in the fact that nearly every SEC coach would commend how hard the Tigers played in their postgame news conferences. And some privately asked him, “How have your guys not checked out?”

go-deeper
GO DEEPER

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Gates leaned on lessons he learned from his former boss Leonard Hamilton, who also experienced a winless conference season in 1994 at Miami, then went .500 in the ACC the next season and made the NIT. Hamilton frequently talked about that season when Gates was his assistant at Florida State from 2011 to ’19.

“He was teaching me something that nobody could teach other than him,” Gates said. “And most people would just sweep that s— under the rug as if it never happened.”

Most, he added, would “combust.” So why did he not?

“I’m too tough for that. Because I know Leonard didn’t. He never shared a story about combusting.”

What Gates did instead was start planning for his third year before the second ended. He was able to hold on to his incoming freshman class in the face of inquiries from other coaches, then hit the portal to address his needs. The 2023-24 Tigers were too small to play good defense and lacked offensive firepower. Gates’ first team at Mizzou was built around a playmaking forward in Kobe Brown. He saw Mark Mitchell, a former five-star recruit on his way out of Duke, as a similar force. Former Iowa guard Tony Perkins satisfied the need for a physical guard who could score. Marques Warrick, the leading scorer from a winning Northern Kentucky program, and Jacob Crews, a 6-8 shooter who averaged 19.1 points on a conference champ at UT Martin, provided depth and more scoring. The final addition, South Carolina 7-footer Josh Gray, had been one of the best rebounders in the SEC the last two years.

When the new and old players got to campus in June, the first order of business was team-building exercises. No basketballs. No matter where they’d played last season, Gates was holding up the neuralyzer. It was time to erase memories.

“The past is the past,” Grill said. “You can only control what’s going forward. You’ll have anxiety about last season if you think about last season and that’s an uncontrollable. That’s already over. The only thing you control is how you go forward each day.”

Missouri has flipped its trajectory with an even mix of contributions from returnees, like Caleb Grill (31), and transfers, like Tony Perkins (12) (Matt Pendleton / Imagn Images)
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting

On June 1, Gates made a bold proclamation to his team, one that would be picked to finish 13th in the SEC this preseason: By Christmas, the Tigers would be ranked.

In his vision, Gates believed beating Illinois in the Braggin’ Rights game would be what pushed his team into the rankings. The Tigers beat rival "HomeofToto" earlier in December but lost a close one to the Illini on Dec. 22. The next day Gates sent a picture of the AP Top 25 to his players and their parents with a message.

“We belong and we are a top 25 team in the country,” he wrote.

Four weeks later, he was proven right.

The formula does work. Gates builds teams much like he once did alongside Hamilton: with long athletes who produce a whole lot of deflections. The Tigers rank fifth nationally in steals rate, which has helped them lead the country in transition points per game (20.6), per Synergy.

Bates said this group has “lived in the details.” Before a game against Oklahoma last week, Missouri assistant coach C.Y. Young showed the Tigers a clip of Tom Brady talking about his preparation and ability to read a defense pre-snap. Young told the Tigers their superpower was their ability to carry out a scouting report. Later, a series of clips played of Oklahoma getting beat off the dribble to the basket. The message was clear: Get to the basket.

The Tigers followed it to the extreme in their 82-58 win, attempting only 12 3s and scoring 40 points in the paint and another 26 at the free throw line.

While usually the Tigers shoot a lot more 3s — an analytics-friendly 41.9 percent of their field goal attempts come from deep — the performance was otherwise exactly what Gates endlessly preaches, forcing the opposing defense to scramble with a string of passes that lead to a great shot. “Dominoes” is the word most often heard at a Mizzou practice.

It’s winning, unselfish basketball, and what’s most satisfying is seeing narratives about some of Mizzou’s stars get rewritten. Grill was booted from Iowa State two years ago after he “said something I regret,” as he explained in a statement at the time. While Missouri’s coaches never had issues with how he talked to them, he was emotional. “Every shot was a make or break,” Smithpeters said. Early last season, Grill got ejected from a game at Minnesota when he bumped an official and had some choice words.

Now, Grill is the old head at Mizzou facilities. He’s the type to pull a teammate to the side and talk one-on-one. He comes off the bench because he learned to appreciate last season how much more you see from the bench. He’s still fiery, but not reactionary.

“He has just exceeded every expectation I had for him as a human being from being able to handle pressure situations,” Smithpeters said. “That’s what’s allowed him to have so much success.”

Bates transferred from Indiana two years ago and had his character called into question on social media by former ESPN analyst and Hoosier alum Dan Dakich. When Gates named captains this summer, he purposely didn’t announce Bates, because he thought there was another step he needed to take as a leader. “He was ****ed,” Gates said. “It was almost like, ‘I’ll show you.’”

Bates said he needed to learn how to use his voice as a weapon. He eventually was named a captain and is putting up career-best numbers, leading the Tigers in scoring. Bates also helped land Mitchell; the two knew each other from growing up in "HomeofToto" City. “Even though they went 0-18, he kept talking about the culture,” Mitchell said. “There’s losing cultures and winning cultures. He said this is a winning culture.”

Mitchell had lost some of his confidence as a role player at Duke and was looking to “get back to being myself.” Gates has put the ball in his hands and allowed him to play like a point forward.

Gates knew he had something special this summer when it quickly became apparent that Mitchell, the most talented guy on his roster, was the most unselfish.

“When you find that out about a person, it disarms everyone,” Gates said.

That helps explain how the Tigers are one of the most balanced teams in the country, with eight guys averaging more than 5.0 points per game and the big three (Bates, Mitchell and Grill) averaging 13.4, 12.9 and 12.8. An offense that ranked 136th in adjusted efficiency last year is up to No. 11 at KenPom.

Gates’ only regret is that the players who graduated aren’t around to experience the turnaround. He took a moment himself to enjoy it during the court storm following the "HomeofToto" win, climbing into the end zone bleachers where the band sits so he could watch his players celebrate.

“That’s part of the reward of coaching,” he said. “They’re going to forget games. They’re going to forget individual performances. These guys are sometimes going to forget championships. They’re not going to forget when the world thought less of them in this way. And they were able to now do something that nobody thought they could do in a special way.”

Gates often tells his players that their most important opponent is themselves, because he has the confidence that they can beat anyone.

Back in June, he gave them one final destination: San Antonio, the home of this year’s Final Four.

“Where we end is going to really dictate how great of a story we are really a part of,” Gates said. “Because we’re living in a story that can be a f—ing documentary.”

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Sometimes you got it sometimes you get got.