COLUMBIA, Mo. • As Mizzou coach Frank Haith looked back at Mizzou's 79-72 loss at Oklahoma State on Jan. 25, his first impulse was to say, "Well, it was great."

Teased about it later, Haith laughed and said he didn't quite mean to say it like that. But he did mean his broader point.

"We've learned from our experience," said Haith, whose third-ranked Tigers play the rematch against the Cowboys at 8:05 tonight at Mizzou Arena.

Then ranked second in the nation, MU buckled in Stillwater after leading OSU 60-53 with just over 6 minutes left.

The Cowboys besieged Mizzou 26-10 down the stretch before Marcus Denmon's token bucket with seconds to go.

OSU, the worst shooting team in the Big 12, made eight of its last nine field-goal attempts to finish with a season-high 59.6 percent.

That was nearly 20 percent better than a typical night for the Cowboys, who enter tonight's game shooting 41.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Mizzou kept misfiring on one of the worst shooting nights of the season (40 percent) for a team that remains third in the nation in field-goal percentage (50 percent).

But the teaching moment for Haith wasn't as simplistic as ordering MU to shoot better and defend better.

"The learning part was how we didn't finish the game," Haith said this week.

Haith put it more vividly immediately after the game, saying the Tigers were 'soft" in their aggressiveness going to the basket, played like an inexperienced team, didn't make hustle plays and freelanced on offense.

"The guys went out and tried to do their own thing a little bit," he said then.

But MU (23-2 overall, 10-2 Big 12) believes the OSU collapse is a key reason it's 3-0 in games decided by three points or fewer since.

"We've definitely shown growth since that game," senior guard Kim English said.

The Tigers weren't necessarily flawless late in the narrow wins against Texas (67-66), Kansas (74-71) and Oklahoma (71-68), but they've generally been more attentive to detail and, simply, found ways to win.

"You have to run your stuff offensively, eat clock up and get good shots at the basket, and then you have to get stops," English said. "If you want to win, you have to do one of those two things.

"If you want to win comfortably, you've got to do both of those two things.

"And if you want to lose, you can do neither of those two things."

Perhaps MU has extra incentive to not want to lose to the Cowboys (12-13, 5-7), but senior guard Denmon stopped short of saying revenge was a motive against one of the only two teams to beat Mizzou.

Just the same …

"It's easier to keep track of them," he said, smiling.

It also should be easier for Mizzou to know who it has to track better on the court this time around: 6-foot-7 OSU freshman Le'Bryan Nash had 27 points, including 19 in the second half.

"We've got to do a great job on him," Haith said.

The great challenge for OSU coach Travis Ford is having his young team braced for the Tigers, who are eager to atone for that game and stay in pace with Kansas atop the Big 12 standings.

"There's just not one way to … slow down Missouri," Ford said.

And perhaps all the more so the second time.