Missouri Basketball: 2023-24 Tigers season recap, including good/bad

What a difference a year makes. Last year, Missouri's season ended in heartbreak at the hands of Princeton in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. This year was a completely different story. Missouri struggled from the jump and its season ended in the opening round of the SEC Tournament.

By all accounts, this year was a complete disaster in the eyes of Mizzou fans as the Tigers failed to win a single conference game for the first time since the 1907-08 season, which was Missouri’s second season with a college basketball team.

I had high expectations coming into this season. Back in August when I was writing the season preview for the Tigers, I was fully bought into this team. I thought that Missouri would make it out of the non-con schedule relatively unscathed. I thought the team was solid enough to make a push for another NCAA Tournament bid. In his first year leading Missouri, Dennis Gates successfully assembled a team comprised mostly of transfer players and found immediate success. I figured lightning would strike twice and Gates would work his magic for a second straight year.

Boy was I wrong.

It didn’t take long for concerns to pop up for this Missouri team. And instead of working out the early season kinks, it seemed like things got progressively worse as the season bore on. The first big red flag this season was in the second game of the season, a loss at home against Memphis. Mizzou’s offense didn’t show up at all scoring only 55 points, making 31.6 percent from the floor. The next big red flag was a loss against a winless Jackson State team at home.

The Tigers turned things around for a little bit, picking up its biggest win of the season on the road at Pitt, while winning four games in a row before the wheels completely fell off, starting with a road loss at Kansas. From December 9 to March 13, Missouri only managed one win. That's three months of the season with only a single win.

Talking about a bad season is never easy, and I’m sure everyone is eager to put this dud of a season behind us. But before I close the book on this past season, I wanted to take one last look back on what went wrong for Missouri this year, areas in which the team regressed, and what went well for the Tigers.