COLUMBIA, Mo. • When the Mizzou men's basketball team traveled to Oklahoma State in 2009 and 2011, MU guard Kim English stopped in the lobby of Gallagher-Iba Arena at the memorial for the 10 members of the OSU traveling party who died in a charter plane crash on Jan. 27, 2001, in Colorado.

"It's right there when you walk in. I guess I've picked up something different reading it every time," said English, who traveled Tuesday with the Tigers to Stillwater for today's 6:30 p.m. game against the Cowboys. "I always go over there and read and say a prayer (for the families).

"I just couldn't imagine that. I mean, we fly planes so much."

Unfathomably, OSU suffered a similarly traumatic incident two months ago when women's basketball coach Kurt Budke and assistant Miranda Serna were among the four killed in a single-engine plane crash in Arkansas as it carried them home from a recruiting trip.

"We get so caught up in the game and the matchups, and you lose and you feel like the end of the world," said English, shaking his head at the notion and adding, "For it to happen again is crazy. Same university, same sport, different gender. Sad, sad. We fly planes so much. It could happen any time."

The circumstances of OSU's tragedies were different, and its team travel criteria were overhauled after the 2001 crash.

But each episode served to reinforce the imperative of safety-first among other travel considerations, particularly significant in the often-harsh Midwest winters and perhaps particularly resonating with a school in the same conference.

Many MU coaches, athletes and administrators were personally crushed by what happened at OSU, where they had colleagues and friends. Mizzou, in fact, was the first school to play OSU afterward.

To Mizzou athletics director Mike Alden, it was reliving "a tragic experience in your life." Alden had been a freshman football player at Evansville when the school's entire basketball program was killed in a plane crash.

"Dec. 13, 1977 … It's a date you'll never forget where you were," said Alden, who was officiating an intramural basketball game at the time.

When the OSU plane crashed, Alden said, he "personalized it" both because of his previous experience and the relationships he had at Oklahoma State.

"Your first reaction is not even about the travel, it's about the people and the tragedy," said Mizzou executive associate athletics director Sarah Reesman, who oversees MU's travel policies and still is emotional about the topic. "That's the first thing you think about. That's your gut reaction.

"And then, you do, you have to take that next step and say, 'OK, what do we need to do to try our best to ensure that we're being as safe as we can be?' "

While MU felt it had good policies in place in 2001, Reesman said, in the wake of the OSU crash it worked with the university's risk management office to review and tweak policies and procedures and became more cognizant of staying current.

Part of its system now mandates 11 criteria for the use of charter flights, starting with an insistence on "an excellent safety record and a current air carrier certificate under FAA part 135 or 121," and 10 criteria for donor and private planes.

The common denominators include a stipulation that "no aircraft may depart into forecast hazardous weather conditions such as severe icing, thunderstorms, severe turbulence or wind shear."

Contracts are awarded by bid, Reesman said, noting that considerations aren't just based on price and adding, "We go through all of our requirements, and procurement on campus helps us vet those as well."

Typically, MU's basketball teams will fly commercial for multi-day in-season tournaments and fly charter for games beyond 250 or 300 miles away, although that can vary with the calendar.

The men's team often has flown to Kansas State and Iowa State, but this season it bused round-trip to Manhattan, Kan., and bused to and flew back from ISU since class wasn't in session.

Complications are a reality, reflected in Mizzou's circuitous two-day bus-and-plane route to OSU last year amid a snowstorm that smothered much of Missouri and Oklahoma and left English calling the team the "Siberian Tigers."

With inclement weather shutting down airports in Oklahoma and Missouri and ultimately closing Interstate 70, MU left two days before the game and a day ahead of schedule for Kansas City in part because the airport in KC had more sophisticated safety equipment than Columbia Regional.

"You're on the phone every hour monitoring the road conditions, you're on the phone with Oklahoma State … the conference office was involved, too," Reesman said, adding, "It's just everybody involved had to provide input with the ultimate goal of playing the game if you can, but knowing that you have to be safe and people have to be comfortable with what's going on."

Travel parameters, of course, will be reviewed when Mizzou's landscape changes next year by joining the Southeastern Conference.

But the methods no doubt will continue to evolve from what English understood was the way in the not-too-distant past.

"Teams used to fly in three small crop-dusters," he said.