There was one thing that surprised Lamont Paris from South Carolina's rough loss on Saturday

It didn’t surprise Lamont Paris that South Carolina shot 2-for-19 from three-point range on Saturday. It didn’t surprise him that his team didn’t adjust to some of the things Mississippi State did on defense. Those things happen.

What did surprise Paris was an apparent lack of fight. In a game that was over within minutes, the Gamecocks were routed in an 85-50 loss to No. 17 Mississippi State in Starkville.

It took nearly 15 minutes for South Carolina to reach its 10th point of the game. Less than four minutes into the second half, the team was down by as much as 30 points. Between a lot of sloppy turnovers and defensive breakdowns, the Gamecocks dug their own grave in their largest loss of the season.

“Not fighting the way that we didn’t fight today, that did surprise me. It did surprise me. That doesn’t anger me, but it did surprise me,” Paris said after the game.

“We’ll show a lot of the stuff on the film when we see it, just situations where it’s you versus that guy. Ability kind of sort of matters, but who you are as a competitor really matters in that one particular moment. And how many ever those that were in the game, we got the short end of the stick in those situations. So that was surprising.”

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Going into halftime, South Carolina was down by 25 points, well out of the game in just 20 minutes of action. It only mustered 18 points on 23.1 percent shooting. The Gamecocks had more turnovers (10) than made shots (6) in the first half.

Even with the Bulldogs up by as much as they were, they never let up in the second half. They kept pounding the Gamecocks, like a bully picking on a kid and shoving them into a locker. The victim, in this case, was South Carolina, who didn’t show much of a pulse after the break. It made a few shots here and there, but Mississippi State kept throwing jabs.

“I’ve been in a lot of games. If I look back to Chattanooga, even multiple times, a couple times we’d play Furman. You should’ve seen the exchanges between Tanner Bronson, my assistant, and myself at halftime in the locker room. Because what offensively we were doing, it just wasn’t working. I think one time we had 18 points in the first half, but we did enough defensively that we were still within striking range,” Paris said.

“So, I only make that point because I’ve seen that a lot. That’s why they play 40 minutes. I’ve seen it a lot. I’m always optimistic about the character and makeup of our team and how we’ll ultimately respond, whether that’s we needed to wake up, whether that was we needed to make an adjustment as coaches to what they’re doing, whether that’s just we need to relax. We need to calm down and play, whatever that is.”

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Paris couldn’t identify an exact moment in the game where he felt the fight just wasn’t there. It all kind of blended together. But based on the fact South Carolina trailed by as much as it did in the second half, that was around the time he could point to when he noticed it.

“There’s a disconnect,” he said. “The lights aren’t coming on still, which is a dangerous game to play, to flick the lights on and flick the lights off.”

Both Paris and the players agreed that they didn’t play with as much aggression as Mississippi State did. The Bulldogs were much better on the glass, winning the rebound battle 40-32. They also had five more steals and 17 fast break points.

“We had to stay in front, and we didn’t stay in front as well as we should’ve. They kind of out-toughed us a little bit,” Nick Pringle said.

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With a few days to regroup, the road only gets tougher from here for South Carolina. SEC play heats up right away with No. 5 Alabama and No. 2 Auburn coming into town this week. There isn’t much time to do a complete overhaul of what didn’t work. But having more fight is something that can be fixed.

“We got 17 more games and it’s going to be a lot of similar games to that,” Pringle said. “So, we’ve got to step up our game a lot to be able to handle the rest of the games coming our way.”

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