Paul Mainieri and LSU have the luxury of treating the Southeastern Conference Tournament like a vacation before the real bullets start flying next week.

Not that Mainieri will take it.

Or, at the least, call it a working vacation.

Mainieri tends to take it seriously whether he has to or not. He’s won the thing five times in his 10 years, even though the baseball tournament is more fickle even than normal baseball.

It probably goes against every grain in his body, but he will defer today and continue an experiment on the mound with seldom-used freshman …

Oh, wait. No, scratch that. After getting to Hoover, Alabama, LSU suspended scheduled experimental starter Todd Peterson for one game due to that ever-pesky “violation of teams rules.” Instead, the Tigers will go with Caleb Gilbert (3-1, 3.09 ERA), a Hoover native who is normally the set-up man in the bullpen. Sounds like the “committee approach” that plagued LSU in the midweek.

Either way it’s a gamble … if it mattered.

After that, though, it will be the usual dose of Alex Lange, Jared Poché and Eric Walker (although all, he says, will be on strict pitch counts to be fresh for next week).

In partially explaining the Tigers’ confounding struggles in midweek games this year, Mainieri explained that none other than Skip Bertman has often advised him not to be afraid to sacrifice a midweek game to find out more about his team for the long term.

But Mainieri didn’t get the Bertman memo about the SEC Tournament.

Whenever Bertman won the SEC Tournament, it was strictly an accident. He won more national championships than conference tournaments.

But Mainieri really seems to like the trophy that, a week from now, nobody will remember who won.

Which is fine.

He doesn’t have to do anything out of the ordinary this week.

With the Tigers’ strong finish — winning 11 of their last 12 SEC games to win the West division share the overall title with Florida — they are guaranteed to host an NCAA regional as a national seed, which allows you to host the super regional if still standing.

It’s also looking like this whole week may be an excellent tune-up for learning to deal with intermittent rain delays that tend to plague Baton Rouge regionals.

Meanwhile, for McNeese, which opens the Southland Conference Tournament in Sugar Land, Texas, it’s a little dicier … but not much.

Experts who really study this stuff for a living — yeah, believe it not, they’re out there — think the Southland is a two-bid league this year, McNeese and Southeastern Louisiana.

That works fine for both of them, but maybe — you never know — only if one of them gets the automatic bid.

If one of the SLC outliers rises up and does what’s known in the trade as “steals” the title and the automatic bid, then there could be some suspenseful moments on Monday morning when the bids go out.

Somebody might get left out. Probably not, but in that scenario you wouldn’t want to be defending a two-and-barbecue tournament record before the tournament selection’s high tribunal.

But McNeese should be bulletproof with at least one win … OK, maybe two … but probably just one.

Meanwhile, the SEC Tournament is strictly for entertainment purposes.

It’s a tournament bracket that defies logic, but in a harmless sort of way.

It’s more a game of Chutes and Ladders than any kind of straight double-elimination bracket, morphing itself indiscriminately between logic and insanity.

You can blame that on Mainieri, too, or at least LSU.

When the Tigers were snubbed by the NCAA Tournament in 2011, about the only mark against them was that they missed the SEC Tournament.

It was a cozy eight-team affair back then and mirrored the old Omaha format once used in the College World Series, with the survivors of the dual brackets meeting in a winner-take-all championship.

But if missing it could be held against an LSU like that, for the next year they gerrymandered a 10-team bracket so only two teams would be left out.

Then Texas A&M and Missouri joined the SEC and, still not wanting to leave more than two teams out, they suddenly had to stuff 12 teams into an eight-team bag of flour.

It was pretty innovative, actually.

It’s not totally fair, but neither is life and certainly not baseball, so you can overlook it when they cut some corners.

The opening games Tuesday were single-elimination, in effect play-in games. LSU and the other top four seeds had byes.

Loser go home.

Now you’ve got your dual four-team brackets again, just as the baseball gods always intended, and it’s double-elimination … for a spell.

They key here is normally to win your first two games, stay out of the losers’ bracket.

In this case, winning today and Thursday — or whenever, depending the weather — gives you Friday off while the one-loss teams play elimination games.

Funny thing about that day off, though. Anybody who gets to Saturday unbeaten will get a phantom loss while enjoying the R&R. They’ll be unbeaten and face a one-loss team, and yet it’s winner-take-all to get to Sunday’s final.

It’s how LSU has lost only two games total in the tournament’s last two years without bringing home a trophy or even reaching the final.

Nobody complains.

Just one of the quirks of SEC baseball.