Watch: Rick Barnes press conference after No. 5 Tennessee's 72-67 win at Missouri

What Rick Barnes said during his postgame press conference after No. 5 Tennessee’s 72-67 win over Missouri Tuesday night at Mizzou Arena in Columbia:

The biggest difference for Tennessee between the first and second half

“Well, we went with a bigger lineup. We felt like we weren’t getting much from the perimeter. First half, didn’t make any threes. And you look at our post guys, they did a great job. Tobe Awaka had a double-double, he shot the ball well. And I’ve got a lot of respect … I don’t know what everybody else expected. This is what we expected as a team that in Missouri, Dennis (Gates’) teams, they played hard. They had a chance to win the game the other night on the road at Ole Miss. 

“And we knew they were going to come in and fight. And it’s hard to do that when you’ve had the kind of conference season they’ve had. But it’s really a credit to he and his players. Because they fought and we knew that, I thought the first half they played harder. I thought they played with a lot more sense of urgency than we did. And they didn’t do anything that we didn’t talk about. They didn’t. Our, defense really kept us in the game in the first half and then the second half, Dalton obviously got going. He had too many turnovers, but the difference I think was the production we got from our post guys.”

Tennessee winning 20 games for the fifth time over the last seven seasons

“Tennessee’s an an awesome place. It’s a great job, a great fan base. I mean, everybody says it, but I do think that we’ve got the best fan base in college basketball. When I go back to nine years ago when we were not good, we were trying to build it and the fan support back then when we were just struggling to find a way to win games. They were with us from the beginning. And our administration is tremendous in terms of knowing not only as a university, but where we want to be as an athletic department. They’re giving us everything that we need. But so much of the credit where we are today really goes to our older guys. I mean, certainly, when Josiah and Santi came in, that was a little bit of a transition period when the Grant Williams era had ended and those guys came in and got put in a fire. 

“But then when Zakai comes in, a guy that we thought were going to red shirt when we signed him, but after a week he was out there. His DNA had a major impact, but you got Santi and Josia, Jahmai Mashack, who’s played a lot of minutes. And I give them credit for the way that they’ve embraced Jordan and Dalton this year because we won a lot of games last year like this, but we didn’t have a guy that could go get the points like Dalton did tonight when we needed them. And I think it’s just a compliment to our coaches, our players, because, we set the bar high. 

“We want to be a team, like everybody, that wants to play on Monday (in the national championship game), but to do that, (you have to have) the consistency that these older guys (have). What they’ve done is really, I think Santi went over the 1,500 points (against Vanderbilt) and he didn’t even know he was even close. He actually said, what does that mean? He wasn’t sure what it was. And we’ve got an unselfish group of guys. But we’ve got everything that we need. And I was really impressed with our young guys on the bench. I was really impressed with them at halftime. I asked those guys, I said, what do you think we need the second half? And they spoke up and said we need more effort. Which I think that’s a compliment to our older guys too, because they compete against those guys. But the way the they spoke up to me is what our program is about. And the fact that we talk about transparency and everything that we do. And I think we are a program like that.” 

Tennessee slowing down Missouri’s Tamar Bates, the team’s second-leading scorer  

“We really try to emphasize a real team defense. We try to do that. We wanted to certainly be in the gaps and not foul. That was a big thing because they’ve got some guys that shoot a high percentage. They didn’t have a great night shooting tonight at the free-throw line. That was one thing we were concerned about and wanted to play without fouling to give them those opportunities. We wanted to make sure that they didn’t get out in transition as much as we wanted to get out in transition. We felt like if,  sometimes when you shoot threes, they’ll send a guy along and we felt we had to eliminate those kind of baskets. But once we get in the half court, everything we do is personnel based, but it’s based on a team defense. We’re not asking one guy to guard one guy, even though we talk about pride in playing one-on-one. We still know that we’ve got to get support, especially with players like that can do some damage to you.”

Tobe Awaka scoring a career-high 18 points and having 10 rebounds, sparking Tennessee off the bench 

“Honestly, I was pretty upset at halftime because I felt like we were just had lost our poise and guys were all just trying to shoot the ball, hope it would go in. And I just felt like, and I said at halftime to them, I said, you guys, Jonas is a pretty good player, and Tobe. And, and so I knew when coming out of the locker room, I was going to go with a big lineup, which is the most, we’ve done it all year because one, I wanted us to rebound the ball and we knew they were going to change defenses. And with that, we’ve got a set, a certain thing that we want to run. And one of those that we tried to do with those guys, we’re going to take good shots and let those guys go rebound it. And I thought he and Jonas did a good job with it. But I knew coming out of halftime we were going to go with the big lineup anyway. And they got it done for us. And one reason we probably don’t do it more is that Josiah’s out there and knows how to anchor down everything on the defensive end. And we always worry about those guys with the different coverages that we have, can they guard it? And tonight I thought they did a really, a pretty good job.”