The final defensive and offensive possessions of LSU’s 2021-2022 basketball season Friday night were a microcosm of all the lessons the Tigers never learned after 34 games.

With LSU trailing Iowa State by two points in an NCAA Midwest Regional first-round game, Cyclones freshman guard Tyrese Hunter hit a second straight 30-foot 3-pointer with 19 seconds left (and his seventh 3 of the night) when LSU defender Darius Days backed off with the shot clock inside five seconds.

Then after LSU called timeout with 16 seconds remaining, senior point guard Xavier Pinson drove directly into a crowd, committed a turnover and the Cyclones gleefully dribbled out the final six seconds of a 59-54 victory in Milwaukee's Fiserv Forum.

“We were in the game till the end,” said LSU interim coach Kevin Nickelberry, who took command of the team last Saturday when head coach Will Wade and top assistant Bill Armstrong were fired for alleged NCAA Level 1 rules violations. “I said all week it's just basketball, but the distractions were a lot and these guys still fought through those distractions, went out and gave LSU a chance to win tonight."

Yet the Tigers, who finished the season 22-12, didn’t change their stripes under Nickelberry and suddenly improve every weakness they repeated throughout the season.

LSU made just 17 field goals, two fewer than the 19 turnovers the Tigers committed leading to 22 Iowa State points.

“We just couldn't get going, just being stagnant,” said LSU senior forward Darius Days, who had the 25th and final double-double of his 127-game LSU career with 14 points and 12 rebounds. “Some of the guys weren’t moving the ball. Some of the bigs weren’t doing as the guards said.

“There were just a lot of things going on that first half, but it kind of opened up the second half and we started scoring the ball, getting transitions, getting steals, playing catch-up. It was just too much in the end when they hit big shots."

The Cyclones, who entered the game ranked 314th nationally out of 350 Division 1 teams in 3-point percentage, hit 12 of a season-high 37 3-point attempts. Nine of the 11 field goals Iowa State scored in the second half were 3-pointers after LSU’s clueless defensive rotations left Iowa State’s best shooters open.

Hunter, the Big 12 Conference Freshman of the Year, scored a career-high 23 points (13 over his average), 21 from nailing 7 of 11 3's. Senior guard and Penn State transfer Izaiah Brockington, the Big 12 Conference Newcomer of the Year, finished with 19 points.

“Our team at times goes through spells where we don't score consistently enough, but our defense carries us forward, keeps us in the game, and then our offense comes around,” Iowa State first-year head coach T.J. Otzelberger said. "That's been our equation in most of our big wins and that's certainly the case here tonight.

“We've had multiple guys throughout the year step up and hit big shots. Tonight happened to be Tyrese's night and the ball found him. Our guys knew he had the hot hand.”

The Tigers, who committed turnovers on almost 30 percent of their offensive possessions, were hurt by the fact sophomore forward Tari Eason was limited to 20 minutes playing time because of foul trouble.

Eason, the SEC's Sixth Man of the Year, finished with a team-high 18 points, playing almost the last 7:41 with four fouls.

““We came out and we had some early turnovers,” Nickelberry said. "We had some foul trouble early. (Starting center) Efton (Reid) got two and Tari got two early. We tried to do a little bit too much and we turned the ball over. Once we settled down, we were fine.”

With LSU trailing the Cyclones by 12 at 24-12 with 6:37 left in the first half, it was Days who swished a 3-pointer with 6:24 remaining that started and then hit two free throws that closed a 7-0 run that cut Iowa State’s lead to 24-19 at the half.

In the Cyclones’ last 10 possessions of the first half, they missed all eight shots (including 7 3-pointers) and committed two turnovers. Even that frigid spell, the best LSU could do on its final 11 possessions was hit 1 of 9 field goals and a pair of free throws.

Though LSU finally tied the game at 31-31 on two Eason free throws with 14:54 left to play after Iowa State attempted six straight 3-pointers (hitting two), it didn’t deter the Cyclones from shooting the long ball.

Thirteen of Iowa State’s final 15 field goal attempts in the game’s last 10 minutes were 3-pointers. The Cyclones made 5 of them, 4 by Hunter including his closing dagger.

“I made a few, so just knowing that the guys around me trusted me,” Hunter said. “Clock running down to get into the shot that I'd normally take, so the rest is history.”

As is the 2021-22 LSU basketball team, which started the season 15-1, slowly disintegrated losing five of six games when starting point guard Xavier Pinson hurt a knee and never found their early-season mojo once Pinson returned.

Then after three years of alleged rules violations hanging over his head, Wade was fired the day after LSU was eliminated by Arkansas in the SEC tournament.

It will take several months before LSU negotiates a final penalty with the NCAA, but it would be a stunner if the NCAA showed any leniency in penalizing the basketball program because of Wade’s lack of cooperation with investigators.

The sad truth is the Tigers’ program imploded when the final buzzer sounded Friday night. There’s not a player on LSU’s roster who probably has enough blind loyalty to stay with a program that may get a two-year postseason tournament ban.

Whether LSU athletic director Scott Woodward can pull off his fourth showstopping head coaching hire in less than a year remains to be seen. His degree of difficulty finding a big-time splash hire like Kim Mulkey in women’s basketball and Brian Kelly in football has been raised substantially because he nor anyone else at LSU knows how far underground the NCAA will bury the Tigers’ basketball program.

But know Woodward has been preparing for these rocky days since he was hired April 18, 2019 just after the then-suspended Wade was reinstated by the university after agreeing to an amended contract stating he could be fired if he was alleged by the NCAA for committing Level 1 rules violations.

From day one as AD, Woodward has been careful to never publicly show positive support for Wade and the men’s basketball program. Most assuredly, Woodward has been compiling a list of head coaching candidates while waiting for the NCAA investigative process to conclude.

Like his football and women’s basketball searches, Woodward knows his next men’s head basketball coach doesn’t need to have any NCAA investigative baggage or anything privately to besmirch a university still trying to recover from a long list of Title IX atrocities.

The field of Woodward’s desired candidates might narrow even more if he’s trying to find a coach who has stepped into a destitute program emptied by NCAA probation or scandal and turned it into a national power.