Dennis Gates Explains Why Mizzou is Opening Season at Howard, Not at Home

Outside of two rival neutral site games and the SEC-ACC Challenge, Missouri basketball only plays one game on the road on its non-conference schedule this season.

That game is a trip far east to the nation's capital to take on Howard to open the season Monday. The reasoning behind playing a mid-major opponent that's over 900 miles away has multiple layers, head coach Dennis Gates explained in a press conference Friday.

Most importantly, even though the 2,700-capacity arena is by far the smallest Missouri will play in all season, Gates does believe his team will benefit from having to play on the road early before facing the hostile environments of the Southeastern Conference.

"You want to galvanize your team," Gates said. "There's no better way to do that than on the road so you get a sense of team building, you get a sense of camaraderie."

Despite finishing No. 8 in the SEC last season, Missouri had a 3-7 record on the road. Gates is hoping Missouri can take several lessons from the early road trip.

"You know the character of your team by how they treat opponents on the road," Gates said. "And being able to get that at the very beginning, I think, can help us in a tremendous way."

With the small amount of road opportunities in the rest of non-conference play, Gates wanted to be strategic about where they placed the away game on the schedule too.

"I know everybody's not talking about academics during this NIL world, but kids do have finals — and they have a schedule where you can't have games on certain days, so we're not disrupting their schedule," Gates said. "So I want to get that part out the way early so we can build from there and then go into our neutral site games right before the SEC."

This is the second consecutive year where Missouri opens the season on the road, though last year's opener was at Memphis, a much closer location to Columbia than Washington, D.C. Missouri lost that game at Memphis, falling 83-75.

"The hostile environment will allow us to train a certain way leading into that point, no different than we did last season leading into the Memphis game, and then now being able to go in a hostile environment and give our very best," Gates said.

The Tigers will tip off against the Bison on Monday at 6 p.m. The game will be broadcast on ESPN+.