It was the first Saturday in February one year ago that Will Wade remembers not-so-fondly.

He wants to make sure his Cowboys remember it as well.

On that day, Wade took his streaking McNeese State basketball team on the road with a perfect Southland Conference record. They were precisely halfway through the league race.

Looking unbeatable, the Cowboys were upset by Southeastern on that day.

The only difference this Saturday will be the opponent. McNeese will take a 10-0 SLC record into Nicholls for a game Wade knows will be tough.

“This is the same week last year we lost at Southeastern, so I don’t want to hear that stuff,” Wade said. “This is the exact same week we went on the road and lost in this exact same spot at Southeastern. So I don’t want to hear anything about what we got going on in two weeks or what’s going on at the end of the season.

“This is about right now and getting our team ready to play Nicholls; that’s what we need to focus on. So we don’t have the same mistakes we made at this same week, this same time last year against Southeastern.”

The Cowboys will enter coming off a 1-point win last Monday night at Corpus Christi, which gave them a 3-game lead over three teams in the chase to win their second straight conference championship.

McNeese is 16-5 overall, 10-0 for the first time in the Southland, and has won 11 straight games. The Cowboys have also won 21 straight against SLC teams, the longest such streak in the nation, and are 29-1 the last two years in league play.

Nicholls is 12-9, 6-4, and in fifth place. McNeese beat the Colonels 80-71 in the Legacy Center on Jan. 11. It was McNeese’s fifth straight win in the series.

However, Wade felt his team was pushed around on their home floor that day.

“I thought they punked us a bit last time,” Wade said. “We weren’t very physical, and they were more physical than we were. We need to play with more urgency and physicality than we did the first time.”

The Cowboys promise to do just that.

“We are going to have to be physical,” said McNeese forward Brandon Murray. “They are a tough team. They were really physical with us in the first game. We have to match that.”

McNeese got a career-high 25 points from Javohn Garcia in that first game. The senior forward made 12 of 13 free throws, while Quadir Cooper finished with 14 points.

Rob Brown’s 16 points led the Colonels. However, Nicholls was just 4 of 18 on 3-point shooting.

This will be McNeese’s third straight game on the road before for five of their next seven.

“Being the third leg of the trip, it will be a big challenge for us,” Wade said. “Nicholls is a good team; they are very well coached and play hard. We have to have a narrow focus on this game.”

The Colonels are an experienced team led by four seasons: Brown, Byron Ireland, Jaylen Searies, and Jamal West. The four scored 70 of Nicholls’ 81 points in their win over Texas-Rio Grande Valley last Monday.

The group finished with 49 against the Cowboys in January. Tipoff is set for 3 p.m. after the women’s game, which begins at 1 p.m.

The Colonels are looking to make the top four in the league. The top four clubs will get byes in the conference tourney, and the top two will earn double byes to the semifinals.

Only eight of the 12 Southland teams will participate in the tourney, which will be held in early March in Lake Charles.

“Everybody knows the championship runs through Lake Charles,” Nicholls State head coach Tevon Saddler. “We just want to take our shot at them.”

McNeese beat Nicholls in last season’s tournament title game.

On Monday, the Cowboys are back home for the first of three straight games in the Legacy Center. They will host Incarnate Word at 6 p.m., the only meeting between the teams.