3 takeaways from Missouri men's basketball's loss to Georgia

Eli Hoff, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Jan 21, 2026

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COLUMBIA, Mo. — The first half was quirky, prolonged scoring run after prolonged scoring run. The second half was chippy, foul after review after foul.

It wasn't particularly clean. It certainly wasn't pretty.

It also wasn't a win. No. 21 Georgia beat Missouri men's basketball, 74-72, on Tuesday, pulling away in the closing seconds to hand the Tigers their first home loss of the season.

Power forward Mark Mitchell scored 18 points to lead Mizzou (13-6, 3-3 Southeastern Conference), while Marcus Millender led the Bulldogs (16-3, 4-2) with 18 points of his own.

Here are three takeaways from the SEC matchup.

Starters slow out of the blocks again

Did you read the Post-Dispatch's Tuesday morning story about how Missouri's starting lineup has struggled at the start of games? Well, the trend continued Tuesday night.

Coach Dennis Gates made his first substitution of the game after three minutes and 43 minutes of game action. At that point, his starters — the usual combination of Anthony Robinson II, Jayden Stone, Jacob Crews, Mitchell and Shawn Phillips Jr. — were trailing 7-5 and had turned the ball over three times.

The two-point margin as hardly an insurmountable deficit, but it did drop that starting lineup to -19 in SEC play in the minutes between the beginning of the game and the first substitution.

Gates swapped Robinson for T.O. Barrett and Crews for Trent Pierce, and MU promptly scored the game's next five points to take a brief lead.

Not that the starters were the only ones starting slow — the whole team did.

Mizzou did not score a point between the clock reading 15:18 and 7:59 in the first half, a drought of seven minutes and 19 seconds. That was by far the longest scoring drought of the season so far for the Tigers and their second longest of Gates' tenure. Georgia scored 13 unanswered points during that spell which was also the largest scoring run conceded to an opponent by Missouri this season.

Credit where it's due, though: MU followed up its drought with a 10-0 run in less than two minutes that tied the game back up.

Georgia's late and-one wins it

Georgia had an advantage heading into the final minute with a two-point lead, but Mizzou wiped that out with a stop on a possession that was mostly all 10 players scrambling for a loss ball — ending with a rushed 3-point attempt for the Bulldogs that Crews rebounded.

Trailing 71-69 with 34 seconds left, the Tigers ran an action for Crews to come around a screen and hit a spinning 3-pointer from the top of the key. It didn't look like the most comfortable shot, but he swished it, giving MU a 72-71 lead.

Out of a timeout with 9.6 seconds to play, Georgia's Millender got downhill to the rim, where he made a layup and got the foul to put the Bulldogs up by two.

Crews got another 3-point look as time expired that would've given MU a win, but it clanked off the iron.

Big-picture impact

It's still a little early in conference play to call Tuesday's matchup a must-win for Missouri, but the nature of the Tigers' remaining schedule certainly pushes the stakes toward that label. MU has been stellar inside of Mizzou Arena lately but struggled in its last two road matchups, both of which were rather favorable ones, relatively speaking.

Missouri can drop road games so long as it remains close to impeccable at home.

Losing to the Bulldogs threatens that path to the NCAA Tournament and raises the importance of defeating a beatable Oklahoma team on Saturday. Going 1-1 this week, with two home games, is hardly the end of MU's tournament hopes. Going 0-2, however, would mean two missed opportunities and a tougher path to the postseason.

Up next

Missouri hosts Oklahoma at 1 p.m. Saturday to cap off its two-game homestand. The Sooners (11-8, 1-5 SEC) lost at South Carolina earlier on Tuesday.