As a hip-hop bass drum reverberated from the jubilant visitors locker room Saturday backstage at Moody Center, the host Texas Longhorns had no choice but to take their medicine.

They couldn’t stop the music. 

Somehow it makes sense because they couldn’t stop the Texas A&M Aggies, either.

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“They outclassed us,” Texas coach Sean Miller said. “They were the better team from start to finish.”

With a tough road test coming up against resurgent Kentucky on Wednesday, the Horns, who entered this one with two straight wins over ranked opponents, are once again in Miller’s crosshairs and this time it isn’t for something that occurred over the course of an entire game, but a snippet of action that proved too monstrous to overcome.

None of the 11,422 in attendance — aside from the ones wearing maroon — saw this coming, especially after former Aggie killer Tramon Mark’s 3-pointer tied it at 29-29 at the half. The Aggies, however, emerged from the locker room a different team to start the second half. And to their own detriment, so did the Longhorns.

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Over a span of two minutes and 31 seconds, the Aggies assumed command with a 9-2 run — eight from guard Rylan Griffen — and just like that, the Horns were swimming upstream in what must have felt like a thousand-pound weighted vest.

Try as they might, the Horns never recovered from that early second-half blitz.

“I’m telling you right now, in the first four minutes of the second half, we were not ready to play,” Miller said. “There’s one team that was running fast and there’s one team that was not running nearly as fast as they could. There’s one team that came out at halftime, ready to play all the way to the end —  from start to finish — and one team that, for whatever reason, just couldn’t quite get up and get after it like you’re capable of in the SEC in a game of this meaning.”

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It should be mentioned that Miller took responsibility for his team’s lack of bounce-back in that span and, bless his heart, he couldn’t get over what mathematically was only 10% of the game. He went on to say the words “four minutes” 10 times in his 23-minute interview. 

I expect the Horns will hear it several hundred times over the next few days leading into the trip to Lexington. Team leaders Jordan Pope and Mark are the barometer, but they need help. The Texas bench produced a scant five points, one more than Aggies backup center Jamie Vinson, who’s emerging as a nice option off the A&M bench after appearing in only one SEC contest as a Longhorn last season. 

“We definitely have to have a short term memory,” Mark said. “We have to go at Kentucky and win a basketball game.”

It wasn’t that Texas allowed the Aggies to take over, but how the Horns went about their business on the defensive end. The Aggies are smaller than we’re used to seeing — post Rashaun Agee, who’s 6-foot-7, is A&M’s tallest starter — but they played bigger and consistently caught the Longhorns slipping with smart back screens that resulted in easy layups. Agee finished with 17 points and 11 rebounds and won his personal matchup with Texas big Matas Vokietaitis, who played well with 14 points and nine boards.

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“I’m a Birmingham guy, and there’s a guy from Leeds, Alabama by the name of Charles Barkley,” said A&M coach Bucky McMillan. “He was undersized a lot, but he was able to get things done if you gave him enough touches around the basket.”

All told, the Aggies made 15 of 25 field-goal attempts in the second half, including a half-dozen 3-pointers in 10 attempts. That’s the recipe for an ugly home loss after the Horns climbed out of a casket with two conference wins — including a big one at Alabama — to avoid a second straight 0-3 SEC start.

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“When that happens, that’s on me,” Miller said of the second-half’s early slumber. “You can’t spot a team eight points in a game like that and expect to come out on top.”

They sit at 11-7 overall and 2-3 in league play while the Aggies rose to 14-4 overall and an SEC-best 4-1. The league is still ultra-competitive, but isn’t as dominant as last season’s product that qualified a record 14 teams for the Big Dance. With 13 regular-season games remaining, the Horns are still in the mix. But games like Saturday, the late collapse in the opener against Mississippi State and the no-show at Tennessee will be mentioned if they fail to make the tourney field in a couple of months.

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Texas is a veteran team and it’s troubling that its first-year coach is still having issues with the effort or lack of, at times. It points to a bigger problem. Consistency wins in this league and the goal has to be 9-9 at minimum. Somewhere along the line, the Horns will have to start stacking wins. Miller understands what it takes to win in the SEC even if this is his first foray in the league. Saturday’s loss dropped him to 14-13 all-time against SEC opponents as a coach dating back to his first stint at Xavier in 2005. He’s now 1-1 against the Aggies, in case you’re wondering.

There will be other meetings, including a Feb. 28 return engagement in College Station. Between now and then, the Horns will have plenty of time to figure out how to put together a full 40 minutes of hoops.

Kudos to the Aggies, who took this win even if one can’t blame Miller for believing his team gave it away.

The Horns blinked for four minutes.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.