Missouri’s trip to Starkville on Saturday comes with a couple of streaks hanging in the balance, and both teams know exactly what’s at stake.
At Davis Wade Stadium, No. 21 Missouri in the coaches poll and No. 19 in the AP poll will face a Mississippi State team sitting at No. 24 in the AP Top 25 and also drawing votes in the coaches poll. It’s a ranked matchup, and it puts one of the more familiar talking points of the Eli Drinkwitz era back in the spotlight: how the Tigers handle ranked opponents, especially when the game is away from Columbia.
Missouri enters the weekend at 3-0, while Mississippi State is also 3-0 and 1-0 in the SEC. The Bulldogs are chasing a few things of their own, too. They have not won back-to-back conference games since Jeff Lebby took over in 2024, and they have not beaten a conference opponent in Starkville since the 2022 season.
For Missouri, the numbers under Drinkwitz paint a clear picture on the road in league play. The Tigers are 9-15 in SEC road games during his tenure, with season-by-season marks of 2-2 in 2025, 1-3 in 2024, 3-1 in 2023, 1-3 in 2022, 1-3 in 2021 and 1-3 in 2020. Last season, Missouri beat Auburn in double overtime and Arkansas on the road, marking just the second time under Drinkwitz that the Tigers finished without a losing record in SEC road games.
Starkville has already seen Missouri win and lose under Drinkwitz. He is 1-1 there as Mizzou’s coach, with the Tigers beating Mississippi State 39-20 in Lebby’s first year as head coach and losing to a Mike Leach-led Bulldogs team in 2020.
The bigger issue for Missouri has been its results against ranked opponents. Under Drinkwitz, the Tigers are 8-19 against top-25 teams, including a 2025 mark of 1-5, a 2024 mark of 1-3, a 2023 mark of 4-2, a 2022 mark of 1-2, a 2021 mark of 0-3 and a 2020 mark of 1-4. The best of those seasons came in 2023, when Missouri went 11-2 and beat Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl.
Saturday also drops Missouri into a schedule that only gets tougher from here. Seven of the Tigers’ final nine opponents are ranked in either the coaches poll or the AP Top 25.
And when Missouri has had to take ranked wins away from home, those chances have been rare. The Tigers are 2-13 in ranked road games under Drinkwitz, with those two victories coming at then-No.
24 Kentucky in 2023 and at then-No. 25 South Carolina in 2022.
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For Missouri right now, that means the early emphasis is on learning the details. Gates said the Tigers are in an install phase, working through the building blocks that tend to matter most once games start counting, from baseline out-of-bounds plays to halfcourt actions and press break work. It is the sort of offseason reveal that does not create headlines on its own, but it does show where Gates wants the attention to go: teaching, repetition and the kinds of fundamentals that can shape the season later. [Read more 🡒]