Mizzou downs Utah State with Brown-and-Hodge show

SACRAMENTO, California – Missouri used a second-half scoring spurt from Kobe Brown to win its first NCAA Tournament game in 13 years, beating Utah State 76-65 on Saturday.

Brown hit three triples in a span of just over three minutes, sparking a 13-2 run that turned a two-point deficit into a 62-53 lead at the Golden 1 Center.

“He’s our MVP. I can tell you that,” Whitten Family Men’s Basketball Head Coach Dennis Gates. “Finally when he started making some shots in the second half, he immediately made eye contact. He said he was here. I said, ‘Yeah, you are. We can see.’

The seventh-seeded Tigers (25-9), who last won an NCAA Tournament game 4,745 days ago against Clemson in 2010, defeated 10th-seeded Utah State (26-9) 27-14 in the final 9:24 to make it 25.-win plateau for the first time in 11 years.

The 11-point victory was Missouri’s largest margin in the NCAA Tournament since beating Memphis by 11 in the 2009 Sweet 16. The Tigers are 23-0 on the season when outscored by 70 points.

The game was close for the second half until Brown and D’Moi Hodge took over midway through the frame, scoring 20 straight points for the Tigers.

“We didn’t blink,” Brown said. “We felt we had momentum, but we couldn’t show it. If we would have shown it, it would have been very different.”

Brown started the stretch with a dunk, followed by three straight 3s. Hodge stepped up from there by hitting twice from long range around his own dunk. Hodge scored 23 points for the Tigers. Brown has 19.

Mizzou took a 35-31 lead into the locker room after a dunk by Noah Carter with 30 ticks left in the first half. The Tigers led by eight at 16-8 with 13:05 remaining. Carter had 10 points and four boards in the half while Hodge poured in eight and Kobe Brown scored six, grabbed four boards, dished two assists and blocked a shot.

The Tigers forced eight turnovers and held Utah State, one of the nation’s top shooting teams, to 0-for-11 from behind the arc. The Aggies have reached half three in each of their 34 games prior to this season.

Utah State has dropped its last 10 tournament games since beating Ohio State in the first round in 2001. The loss is also the 11th straight to a Mountain West team in the NCAAs.

Mizzou advances to the second round of the South Regional and will play the winner of the Arizona-Princeton game on Saturday.