Feb. 23—Oklahoma State men’s basketball coach Mike Boynton wouldn’t view the aftermath of three straight doubledigit losses as a chance to reset. There isn’t much time for that anyway.

The Cowboys were riding the high of six wins in seven games, including a five-game win streak, before dropping back-to-back-to-back contests to No. 5 Kansas, at No. 22 TCU and at West Virginia, respectively.

With three games left in the regular season, a stretch that starts with hosting No. 14 Kansas State at 1 p.m. Saturday in Gallagher-Iba Arena, Boynton believes the Pokes just need to get back to the very thing that carried them throughout the first three months of the season.

“We’re trying to finish strong. One thing I talked to the guys about: It’s like 4:45, 4:50 on Friday,” Boynton said Thursday evening. “Like, there’s still work to do. But we’re close. We’re close, and we’ve gotta keep our focus on the things that give us a chance to finish strong.”

Those things? A defense that ranked fifth in KenPom’s defensive efficiency (points allowed per 100 possessions) entering the matchup with Kansas on Valentine’s Day. After this Wednesday’s slate of games, the Cowboys had fallen to 14th.

And senior forward Kalib Boone, who’s tied as the team’s leading scorer and is OSU’s second-best rebounder, played a combined 16 minutes in a 100-75 loss to TCU on Saturday and an 85-67 loss to West Virginia on Monday While the latter of the two drastically changes how the Cowboys operate on both ends of the floor, they haven’t been able to win without the former, and Boynton is well aware of that.

“Biggest concern I’ve had is, our defense kind of went away,” Boynton said. “That’s something we’ve been able to kind of recalibrate a little bit here with the — I guess an extra day of practice this week, having played on Monday.”

Giving up 100 to the Horned Frogs was the first time the Cowboys have allowed an opponent to eclipse the century mark since doing so in a 109-89 loss to then-No. 7 Oklahoma on Jan. 3, 2018. TCU shot 68 percent from the field and, as the 10thworst team in the country for 3-point percentage (29.12), hit at a clip of 55 percent from beyond the arc.

The Pokes held the Mountaineers to 60 points during a win in the first meeting on Jan. 2. But WVU turned things around in the rematch, with both Tre Mitchell (22) and Erik Stevenson (23) dropping 20-plus on OSU.

Those two outings were outliers for the Cowboys, who still own the secondbest scoring defense in the Big 12 — and 78th in the country — at 66.3 points per game. In their first 12 conference games, they held opponents to an average of 65.5 points.

They allowed Kansas, TCU and WVU to post a three-game average of 90.6 points per contest.

“Those last two games, everybody just, like, took ownership of what they didn’t do right,” Boone said. “We got three games left. You know, let’s just go be us. Like, the only thing we can say is that we haven’t done the one thing that we’ve done all year, and that was really guard.”

For Boone, who emerged as a premiere post player for OSU while 7-foot-1 big man Moussa Cisse missed time with an ankle injury, his lack of minutes over the past two games has been a result of picking up early fouls. He had two in the first 10 minutes against TCU, and he had another pair in the first two minutes against WVU.

A large part of that, Boynton said, was the matchup challenge that both of those teams present with traditionally built post players. At 6-foot-9, 198 pounds, Boone struggled to match up with TCU’s Eddie Lampkin (6-foot-11, 262 pounds) and WVU’s Jimmy Bell (6-foot-10, 285 pounds).

“Teams are gonna probably try to get me out the game early. With that being said, I can’t go block shots or be physical with certain people,” Boone said. “Like, they might be able to push me, but I can’t push them. and I’ve just gotta adapt to the refs and the calls.”

This Saturday isn’t just another game, and that’s for a couple of reasons.

The first is the fact that it will be an alumni weekend, which will bring in more than 100 people — former players, managers, and coaches — with ties to the program.

The second: The Cowboys were climbing up the Big 12 standings just two weeks ago. Now, they’re back on the bubble of the NCAA Tournament with Selection Sunday looming. Less than two weeks away from the Big 12 Tournament in Kansas City, Missouri, every win matters.

“For the seniors, I want them to know that this is a place — even though as they finish here over the next couple of weeks — that they can always come back,” Boynton said. “But then there’s also the element of the game. It’s a big game. We need a win. So, we’ve gotta play well against a really good team.”