They were one of college basketball’s worst teams. Now they own a historic turnaround and NCAA tournament dreams

Find a team on a losing streak, and you’ll find a coach who has trouble sleeping.

Last year, on the many nights when Missouri coach Dennis Gates was awake well past midnight processing how his Tigers were on their way to an 0-18 regular-season record against conference opponents — the school’s worst in more than a century — he didn’t pass them alone. He dialed longtime mentor Leonard Hamilton, the head coach at Florida State.

Gates had hung on Hamilton’s every word as a Seminoles assistant for eight years before leaving in 2019, from listening to his press conferences to taking notes on his laptop as Hamilton told stories in his office. One that Hamilton relayed during those sessions was about his 1993-94 season coaching Miami, as the Hurricanes endured an 0-18 record in Big East play.

Facing his own winless winter last year, the 45-year-old Gates “called his cellphone at 2 in the morning,” Gates told NBC News.

“If he don’t pick that up, I called his house 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning. You can hear him clear his throat. I said, ‘Coach, you asleep?’ He said, ‘No, I’m waiting on your call.’”

Said Hamilton: “Most times, I answered on the first ring.”

Sparked in part by the guidance Gates took from those calls, together with a healthier roster and a buzz saw offense, Missouri this season has authored a historic turnaround that will continue Sunday when Missouri is projected to hear its name called as one of the 68 teams in the bracket for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

One year after going 0-18 in the Southeastern Conference — 0-19 when including its first-round loss in the conference tournament — and 8-24 overall, the Tigers now enter the NCAA tournament at 22-11, having gone 10-8 and tied for sixth in the SEC, the nation’s deepest conference this season. It marks the first time in SEC history that a school has gone winless in conference play one season and then recorded double-digit conference victories in the next, according to research by Missouri.

The Tigers have beaten three teams ranked in the top five — Alabama, Florida and Kansas — thanks to an offense that has leaped up the national rankings from 215th in scoring offense (72.2 points per game) to eighth (84.5).

Madness, indeed.

Kentucky coach, Mark Pope, this month called the Tigers “one of the great stories in college basketball.”

Gates, whose Tigers had gone 25-10 and made the NCAA tournament’s second round during his first season at the school in 2023, “didn’t forget how to coach in one year,” Hamilton told NBC News.

“I think that the [transfer] portal and how that works, sometimes you can recruit good players and good kids that don’t fit your system, and once you understand that out there, it’s not like the players are wrong or the coaching system is wrong. It’s just that when you caught in those situations, you have to find who fits the way you want to play,” he said. “And I think that’s what he did. He thoroughly evaluated what he needed and what he didn’t have, of those things that are important to him, and I think they became wiser.”

They certainly became healthier.

Tigers players missed 111 games to injury last season, including a foot injury that sidelined top contributor John Tonje for last season’s final two months — Tonje, who has since transferred to Wisconsin, is one of the Big Ten’s leading scorers — and key reserve Caleb Grill, who played nine games before a wrist injury.

“Unheard of,” Gates said. “I would like to see any coach at this level withstand that storm of injuries.”

Also nearly unheard of was the patience shown by Missouri’s administrators amid the downturn at a time when “you have a lot of knee-jerk reactions going on in our sport,” Hamilton said. Although the athletic director who had hired Gates at Missouri had departed, leaving Gates with a new boss, the coach not only did not lose his job but did not gut his staff, either.

Asked to explain the turnaround, Gates spent much of an interview crediting those around him, from the school’s president to his assistants and their specific areas of expertise.

“I didn’t second-guess what we’ve been doing,” Gates said. “We got some talented coaches who got a blueprint that ADs and other institutions covet: how to build something that is at the bottom. … It’s easy to start on third base. It’s easy. But what happens when you start outside the ballpark, not even in a dugout, outside the ballpark?”

But Gates, too, “deserves a lot of credit,” said Garth Glissman, an associate commissioner who oversees the SEC’s basketball operations.

“A lot of coaches in that scenario would just completely clean house, and that’s not what he did,” Glissman told NBC News.

“He’s not the kind of guy to run a bunch of kids off at the first sign of adversity,” he added. “And so he stayed with the kids in this program who wanted to stay with him, and he went out and supplemented the roster with some impactful transfers. But by no stretch of the imagination is this Missouri team a completely different roster than last year. There’s a lot of key pieces that returned, and that’s credit to coach Gates.”

Having recovered from his wrist injury, Grill is averaging 14.2 points per game off the bench while shooting 42% from 3-point range and nearly 50% from the field overall. Voted the SEC’s Sixth Man of the Year, Grill is “one of the most improved players in the country, but also, there’s no better sixth man in our country,” Gates said.

“They’re deep,” ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla told NBC News. “They have two go-to scorers in Mark Mitchell and Tamar Bates, they have a young point guard who is a sophomore, Anthony Robinson, who I love, and they’re a terrific offensive team. They’re very much up-tempo, and they take care of the ball. They’re a complete offensive team right now.”

Mitchell transferred from Duke and immediately became the Tigers’ leading scorer and a third-team all-conference honoree. Bates, a 6-foot-5 guard who played with Mitchell in high school, has shot a career-high 60% inside the 3-point arc, and a career-high 39% outside it. Robinson was named to the SEC’s all-defensive team.

Missouri had not scored more than 100 points in any of its first 226 SEC games since joining the conference in 2012, yet this year has hit triple-digits twice. Not surprisingly, the Tigers are on pace to record their highest-scoring season since 1989-90.

This isn’t Gates’ first quick rebuild. Cleveland State had not played in an NCAA tournament in 11 years when it hired Gates in 2019, yet made the tournament in only his second season. The blueprint Gates used there, and at Missouri again this season, was developed from the lessons he’d learned in part by observing Hamilton at Florida State. Though the transfer portal has allowed teams to make wholesale roster changes during a single offseason, the “fit” of those players is paramount, Hamilton said.

Hamilton, who is retiring at Florida State this season after a career spanning 37 seasons and 660 victories, said it was only right that he pick up the phone to pay forward the type of help he received as a young coach when he would bounce ideas off mentors including John Thompson, the late NCAA title-winning Georgetown coach, and George Raveling, a former college coach and longtime Nike executive.

“We have talked about things on a regular basis for a number of years,” Hamilton said. “I think that has allowed him to relate to some of my journeys. But I think that you gather all your information, you evaluate what you think the challenges are, and you move on. I mean, Dennis is a great coach.”