The losses keep adding up for the Mississippi State University men’s basketball team. The Bulldogs took on the University of Georgia and suffered an ugly loss, losing by a margin of 20 points, 75-55, Wednesday night, extending its season-long losing streak to six games.
The loss now puts the team at 3-8 on the year in conference play. 
A frustrated head coach Rick Ray said he did not see any positives to take away from the game.
“It’s disappointing that we end up losing this way after playing so well at the beginning of the first half.  Our guys lost their energy. There is just no way you can play the way you did in the second half after you played so well to start the game,” Ray said.
MSU has no time to hang its heads as it gets ready to prepare for two tough road tests.  
The Bulldogs will travel to Auburn Saturday for a 12:30 p.m. tip-off. MSU defeated the Tigers earlier this season at home 82-74 and will look to duplicate that same success on the road. 
The team will then have to face another set of Tigers when it travels to Baton Rouge to take on LSU on Wednesday before returning home to face Arkansas on Feb. 22.
In Wednesday’s action, MSU got off to a promising start in the first half and saw its biggest lead reach as high as 14 points at the 9:54 mark.  UGA would eventually climb back from that defecit as it took a one point lead into halftime, 28-27.  
When things started back up for the second half, everything that could possibly go wrong for MSU did.  
The team shot 35 percent from the field and was 0-for-13 from behind the arc.  
The home Bulldogs could not get any shots to fall, and the defense faced a few struggles of its own — allowing Georgia to shoot 74 percent from the field in the second half.  
Senior guard Tyson Cunnigham said when the team lost its energy, it was not able to pick it back up.
“Once our shots weren’t falling, we lost focus on the defensive end,” Cunningham said.  “We had too many defensive breakdowns. We were trying to live through our offense and three-point shots, and that wasn’t working for us.”
Freshman point guard I.J. Ready re-joined the team after being out due to injuries and flu-like symptoms. 
Ready logged 21 minutes with three points and a pair of rebounds in his return to the court. He said despite being on a losing streak, the team still has to find a way to fight through this adversity.
“We have to stay positive and stay together, or it’s going to get worse from here,” Ready said. “Hopefully, we can get it together. In our next game, if we stay together, maybe that will give us a confidence-builder going into the rest of the season.” 
Losing streaks can be difficult for any team to handle, especially a young one.  Continuing to stay focused and motivated will be beneficial for the Dogs as they look to snap their losing skid and turn things around. 
The Bulldogs have eight games remaining on their schedule and will need a strong surge over these next few games to finish with a winning record in conference play. The team’s depth is always the focus point as MSU has five fewer scholarship players than every other SEC team, but Ray said he is not using that as an excuse.  He said the team has to accept who they are and start believing in themselves.
“We have to make sure we stay collective as a unit and make sure everybody is on the same page,” Ray said.