Florida’s Alex Tyus scores two of his team-high 23 points against Auburn on Thursday in Nashville. (Photo courtesy Southeastern Conference)

Contributed
(March 12, 2010)

NASHVILLE, Tenn.  - Alex Tyus scored 24 points, and Florida snapped a three-game skid by beating Auburn 78-69 Thursday night in the opening round of the Southeastern Conference tournament.

The Gators held Auburn’s top scorer, Tay Waller, scoreless.

“I think with a shooting team, if you can try to disrupt their flow a little earlier in the game and you can disrupt some threes from going in early, sometimes you have a better chance of stopping it,” Florida coach Billy Donovan said. “But Waller the last five games has been by far the best three-point shooter in the league if you look at the numbers. In five games, he was like 17 for 24 from the three-point line. So he concerned a lot of people over the last five games.

“And I thought our guys did a pretty good job switching out on him and trying to take away his threes. And we tried to make him take some shots maybe out of rhythm.”

Florida took a nine-point lead into the halftime break (40-31). The Gators led by as much as 14 in the first half after a dunk by Alex Tyus at the 9:38 mark. UF’s 14-point advantage was the largest lead of the game.

“They’re big. You can see we’re not. We’re very small,” Auburn coach Jeff Lebo said. “That’s part of the reason. And they went bigger against us. They played a lot of Parsons at the two, where they were 6′8", 6′9", 6′10", 6′10". And we’re 6′6" and 6′8" back there a lot of times. So they did hurt us on it. We prepared a lot for it.”

Auburn opened the second half with an 8-0 run to get within one at 40-39. The Tigers held the Gators scoreless for the first 4:11 of the period. Frankie Sullivan did most of the damage. He finished with a career-high 27 points.

“I wasn’t trying too much to be scoring,” Sullivan said. “I was scoring to help win the game. It doesn’t matter to me scoring the points. I just want to win.”

Now Florida (21-11), already 7-0 against the SEC West, has a chance to add another win Friday night against Mississippi State, the West’s No. 1 seed, in the quarterfinals.

Auburn (15-17) beat Florida in the quarterfinals last year. But the Tigers now have lost 12 of 13 games to Florida in what could be coach Jeff Lebo’s final game with Auburn.

“I mean, we just got done with the game, so I haven’t really thought about the body of work after this game. Probably not the best time to ask that question,” Lebo said.

“We’ll meet like we always do at the end, like most head coaches and ADs meet. We’ll have our discussion. That will be private. It will happen at some point here soon, I’m sure.”

Chandler Parsons scored 21 points for Florida, and Vernon Macklin had 10.

Auburn’s DeWayne Reed added 18 and Lucas Hargrove 11.