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COLUMBIA, Mo. — The Missouri men’s basketball team is entering the decisive days: the games, the possessions, the seconds when seasons flourish and fade. Victories come with invitations to the next day’s action. Defeats are discharges back to the home front.

Pardon the poetry. It’s the postseason.

The No. 21 Tigers begin Southeastern Conference play at 6 p.m. Thursday in Nashville, Tennessee, facing Mississippi State, a 91-62 winner Wednesday over Louisiana State in the first round. Mizzou, which finished the regular season 21-10 overall and 10-8 in SEC games, holds the seventh seed in the league tournament.

MU will be the favorite in its tournament debut, given that it beat the No. 10 seed Bulldogs (21-11, 8-10) soundly earlier this year. Should Missouri win, it’ll face No. 2 seed Florida at 6 p.m. Friday.

Mizzou traveled to Nashville on Tuesday afternoon without a perfect idea of who it’ll play Thursday — not that coach Dennis Gates really wanted one. The Tigers’ preparation process is interesting this time of year, given that they’ve played (and therefore scouted) every team in the SEC at least once.

During the postseason, “it’s no preparation other than walk-throughs,” Gates said before the team’s departure. “You have games every day, and you got to decide and figure out, once the game is over… which scouting report to pull out. You want to concentrate on your team, and then concentrate on the opponent while understanding it could be LSU, it could be Mississippi State.“

That is, of course, not the norm. Missouri typically divvies up its coaching staff on scouting duties, with some focusing on the offensive aspect of an upcoming opponent while others key in on the defense.

“It’s a little bit different,” veteran guard Caleb Grill said, “because you have to do two preparations at once.”

There’s time yet before the Tigers get too specific.

Mizzou opened the week with a self-scout: coaches focusing on their own players’ tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. Two takeaways emerged from that process: fouling and late-game execution.

MU, in this season’s system, has a love-hate relationship with fouls. The Tigers tend to do very well at getting to the free-throw line, but when that method of scoring isn’t reliable during a given game, the offense can become shaky. Similarly, Missouri’s handsy defense — and, less intentionally, sometimes-sloppy rotations — can solicit some more foul calls than the coaching staff would like.

As Gates explained it, the priority for the postseason is broadly to keep opponents off of the free-throw line as much as possible, a straightforward goal that comes down to understanding when fouls on the floor are preferable and which players from the other team are lesser free-throw shooters.

Then there’s the matter of preparing for clutch-time moments.

“It’s going to be very, very strategic during this time,” Gates said. “As you know, end-of-game (execution) is going to be important. We’ve let some end-of-game situations slip us. So we want to be able to cover those in more detail.”

Mizzou let a lead slip away in the final minute against Vanderbilt because of poor execution — and some big-time shot-making from the Commodores, in fairness. A recent game between Alabama and Tennessee came down to a five-second call on an inbounds play.

Gates mentioned both games as examples of why familiarity with the final minutes of games is so important at this time of year in particular.

“Those are the situations that are going to reoccur for the remainder of everyone’s season,” he said, “and we just want to be able to make sure we’re getting ahead of it.”

Gates spent his weekend revisiting scouting reports from the regular season matchups with LSU and Mississippi State, which took place on Jan. 7 and Feb. 1 respectively. He was getting game plans ready for each opponent, but also for things to emphasize to his team in the meantime.

“What common denominator, from an offensive standpoint, do I deliver to my team that’s in common (with both teams)?” he said. “And defensively, the same thing — and that’s what you work on.”

Missouri’s first shootaround inside Bridgestone Arena, where the tournament is held, will mostly be about familiarity in a new gym. Then, once the Mississippi State-LSU game went final Wednesday night, the researched rubber of the specific game plans hit the road.

“Once we find out, that night, who we play, I’ll end up delivering the rest of that to the team,” Gates said.

A run to the SEC title game would require the Tigers to flip the three-game losing steak they’re carrying into the tournament into three straight wins, where top-seeded Auburn would be the likely opponent.

Besides a chance to regain some confidence by winning a game for the first time since Feb. 25, there’s NCAA Tournament seeding at stake for MU. According to Bracket Matrix’s collection of several dozen projections, the Tigers are in the No. 7 seed mix for the big dance as they begin postseason play.

A Thursday night win might not move the needle too much, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt Missouri’s chances of moving back into 6-seed territory. A loss would likely lock in 7-seed status, and a run into the SEC Tournament’s latter stages could perhaps push Mizzou back up the seed lines a little bit. But that’s mostly a question for the back end of this weekend, when the bracket comes out and maps out where SEC teams will export their style.

“I just hope our conference hasn’t and won’t beat each other up so much that we can’t perform in March,” Gates said.