KNOXVILLE - The statistics say South Carolina has the best defense in Southeastern Conference men's basketball.
Tennessee can vouch for the veracity of the numbers after running head first into a garnet-and-black wall.
The Gamecocks smothered their hosts from start to finish and handed the Volunteers a third straight defeat with a 70-60 win in an ugly game at Thompson-Boling Arena on Wednesday night.
"That was really a thing of beauty, wasn't it?" Vols coach Rick Barnes said. "I thought both teams played extremely hard defensively. Offensively we were woeful and weren't aggressive. You've got to give South Carolina credit, but I just thought we were really tentative.
"I didn't enjoy watching our team play tonight. I thought it was the first time all year we were really tentative for long periods of time. That's what was really disappointing."
The teams combined for 44 turnovers and 38 field goals, but the box score was considerably uglier for the Vols (8-8, 1-3), who shot just 32.7 percent from the field and made only one of 11 attempts behind the 3-point line.
South Carolina (13-3, 3-0) entered the game allowing opponents to average 60 points and shoot 37 percent from the field and nearly 29 percent on 3s, and fifth-year coach Frank Martin's team certainly backed up to those SEC-leading numbers.
"When we score a little better and we don't turn it over 20 times, I kind of like our chances a lot more," Martin said. "Our defensive concepts are something that our team continues to grow into, and it's predicated around not letting teams run their offense. West Virginia doesn't allow you to run your offense through their full-court trapping pressure.
"Ours is decided to not let you run your offense through different techniques, but it's the same philosophy."
Tennessee played its first game since dismissing guard Detrick Mostella on Tuesday night, and the Vols certainly looked like they missed the player who had been their second-leading scorer by averaging 10.5 points.
Barnes downplayed Mostella's absence with eye-opening honesty.
"We can talk about Detrick," he said, "and he's had games - he didn't play very well at Florida Saturday. He was a nonfactor there. He's been a nonfactor in games this year. If you really think about it, and you guys have watched him, he was either feast or famine.
"The one thing he did, where he'd gotten better, was - again, he hates, more than these guys, playing against pressure. That's why he struggled at Florida Saturday. It wouldn't have been a difference, because South Carolina, they pressure better than anybody that we've played and do a better job.
"He, like our guards, they haven't shown they wanted to play against that kind of pressure."
Freshman Grant Williams acknowledged Mostella's absence was noticeably "awkward" before the game, while senior Robert Hubbs III said Mostella's dismissal wasn't to blame for a sluggish first half in which the Vols made six shots, endured droughts of six and seven minutes without hitting a basket, missed seven free throws and committed 14 turnovers.
"I leave that up to Coach (Barnes)," Hubbs said. "It was his decision. I'm just here to play basketball."
At the least, the Vols missed Mostella's long-range shooting.
His 95 career 3-pointers accounted for 42 percent of the 224 combined triples by Tennessee's young roster, and the percentage leaps to 56 when graduate transfer Lew Evans's 55 treys at Tulsa and Utah State are excluded.
Tennessee's 182-game streak with at least one 3, which dates back to a 2011 loss to Duke, only survived when Lamonte Turner got a friendly bounce on a long-range attempt with 1:48 left and the outcome already determined.
"We're going to miss Detrick," Williams said. "He's a great guy. He was working his butt off. He's just a comical character. He's a good guy to have around, and (not) having him here, who knows. We can't really tell you one way or the other. You never know how a game's going to go. We're going to miss him, but we've got to keep moving."
What was most alarming for the Vols is the Gamecocks committed 22 turnovers and still won comfortably.
"I know my guys try to play hard, and I respect the heck out of (Barnes) because he gets his guys to play hard," Martin said. "But between turnovers and fouls and bad decisions, we just made this a prehistoric game today. It was unbelievable."
For Tennessee, it was disheartening.
"We just didn't come ready to play, didn't execute, didn't run our offense," Hubbs said. "We played great defense. But the offense wasn't there."
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.