COLUMBIA, Mo. — Dennis Gates is wearing a Lululemon hoodie with a hole in the right elbow. Gray sweats. Gray high tops. Same outfit he wore yesterday, same one he’ll wear tomorrow. On game days, Missouri’s coach is always in the same black suit, a gold tie and the shoes he wore to his introductory news conference five and a half years ago for his first head coaching job, at Cleveland State.
It’s not superstition. Gates does not want to waste time or energy on what to wear each morning. Fittingly, he wears the same face every day, too. Prefers that you cannot tell whether he won or lost. “That’s my temperament,” he said, “and I remain steadfast in it.”
And a year ago, boy did it come in handy.
After a successful first year — 25 wins, the program’s first NCAA Tournament victory since 2010, a fourth-place finish in the SEC — Gates’ honeymoon phase at Missouri came to an abrupt halt in Year 2 with the program’s first winless conference season (0-18) since 1908.
No matter the era, few coaches survive not winning a conference game. The last coach before Gates to go winless in the SEC — Bryce Drew at Vanderbilt in 2019 — was fired. A.M. Ebright was the coach of those 1907-08 Tigers, Missouri basketball’s second year of existence and first in a conference (the Missouri Valley). That was also Ebright’s only season ever as a head college basketball coach; he coached the University of Kansas baseball team the next year, then moved to Wichita to practice law.
“I don’t know of an 0-18 coach that ain’t got fired,” Gates said.
But Gates just kept operating how he had in his first season, leaning on a line from one of his favorite poems, Rudyard Kipling’s “If”, as his mantra:
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same
There were excuses to be made — and we’ll get to those — but Gates kept his cool throughout the year. No blowups. No finger pointing. Same tone. Same rhetoric.
“He is the most even-keeled person emotionally that I’ve ever seen,” said Gabe DeArmond, who has covered Missouri athletics since 2003. “When things are not good, it frustrates people that he isn’t more angry. But then when things are good, he insists they’re not playing well.”
Now things are good: Gates’ third Mizzou team is 19-6, No. 15 in the AP poll and 8-4 in an SEC being discussed as the strongest conference ever. Only two high-major programs have made the NCAA Tournament following a winless conference season — 1987-88 Maryland and 2020-21 Iowa State.
In the transfer portal era, it’s possible to flip a roster quickly, as programs like Michigan and Louisville have shown this season. Missouri has not shied away from that strategy, with five transfer players contributing, but at those other places, there’s a new head coach in town, easily able to run off the guys who were on the court for the previous season’s losses.
Instead of stripping the program back down to its studs, Gates held on to his core: Five players in his current rotation, including three starters, are holdovers. The team that will welcome in No. 4 Alabama on Wednesday night has no shortage of memories from how far it has come in a short time to be jockeying for position with the best teams in the country.
“We had to be a participant in our own rescue,” said Tamar Bates, one of those returners. “Literally in real-time we’re seeing ourselves write our names in history books.”
如果可以遇见 Triumph 和 Disaster
和对这两 impostors 命名最近一样
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