When Mizzou caught the final out to cap off a 10-9 win over Missouri State a week ago, Tigers pitcher P.J. Green turned and started barking at the Bears’ dugout.

It didn’t matter that the Tigers were in the midst of a historically bad season, during which they still hadn’t won an SEC game or that Green possessed an ERA above six runs. The feud between the two in-state programs was alive and well, as Bears coaches kept them from pouring out onto the field, and Bears coach Joey Hawkins barked at the umpire.

“It’s just a rivalry,” Hawkins said. “It gets the juices going. Those are the games for why I coach and why I wanted to be around competitive environments when I was done playing.”

A week later, Missouri made the drive down from Columbia to Springfield to cap off the home-and-home, and the Bears kept the ending of the game in mind. They were told to talk more with their bats instead of with their mouths, and it turned into one of the Bears’ largest blowouts of the team from up north in program history.

Missouri State throttled the Tigers with an 11-0 run-rule win in seven innings. Max Knight, who got the win on the mound, hit a two-run walk-off to give the Bears their second win over an SEC opponent this season.

“Two more than someone else,” Hawkins said.

Missouri State, alone atop the Missouri Valley Conference standings, put behind a 1-3 week behind home runs from Knight and Caden Bogenpohl. The latter went 3 for 4 with two RBI and a double, while Taeg Gollert went 2-2 with three RBI and a triple.

The Bears’ pitching staff combined to hold the Tigers to three hits in front of 3,581 in attendance, which is the program’s largest crowd since Missouri State beat Mizzou in 2017.

“Playing these guys just means a lot more,” Bogenpohl said. “They got us the first time, and words were exchanged, which we didn’t like. We kind of took that into this game, and we got the result we really wanted.”

The result was the Bears’ second-largest margin of victory over the Tigers and their third shutout victory in series history. It snapped a five-game losing streak to Mizzou, which dropped to 13-27, while sitting at 0-18 in SEC play with a trip to No. 18 Alabama this weekend.

The Bears are 2-1 in SEC play after beating Arkansas in Fayetteville earlier in the year. Missouri State will host the Razorbacks on April 29 at 6 p.m. The Bears will first host Evansville in a three-game series, starting Friday at 6:30 p.m.

We’ll see if the Bears can conjure up any bad feelings toward the Purple Aces as they look to extend their MVC lead.

“Don’t spend time talking smack when we have another game a week later,” Hawkins said of the Tigers. “That fueled our guys, I can promise you that. Our guys came out pretty aggressive tonight. I’m sure that walk-off home run with the light show going on in front of their dugout felt pretty good for our guys.”