GAINESVILLE, Fla. \u2013 Alex Condon scored 26 points, Xaivian Lee added 19 and No. 5 Florida celebrated its first Southeastern Conference title since 2014 with a 108-74 romp over Mississippi State on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey presented the Gators with the regular-season trophy before their home finale, and Florida formally secured the outright championship when Georgia closed out No. 16 Alabama earlier in the night.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, coach Todd Golden\u2019s team wanted to finish the season \u201cthe right way\u201d \u2014 with a 10th consecutive win.<\/p>\n
This one looked a little shaky early but ended like the others \u2014 with the Gators pulling away in the second half. It felt over when senior Micah Handlogten scooped a ball heading out of bounds to Urban Klavzar for a corner 3-pointer that put Florida up 19 with a little more than 11 minutes remaining.<\/p>\n
Golden won his 100th game at Florida (24-6, 15-2), becoming the fastest to reach the milestone in school history and breaking the previous mark set by Billy Donovan.<\/p>\n
Rueben Chinyelu finished with 11 points and 16 rebounds for his 18th double-double of the season, breaking the school record set by Bob Smyth in 1976.<\/p>\n
Josh Hubbard led the Bulldogs (13-17, 5-12) with 21 points. <\/p>\n
Playing without leading scorer Thomas Haugh (precaution), Florida fell behind by 10 points in the early going. Mississippi State made seven consecutive shots while building a 24-14 lead.<\/p>\n
The Gators responded in a big way, though. They used an 18-0 run spanning six minutes \u2013 their longest in SEC play this season — to flip the scoreboard and start looking like the team that had won nine in a row by an average margin of 22 points.<\/p>\n
Seven Florida players scored during the spurt. The Bulldogs, meanwhile, missed 11 consecutive shots.<\/p>\n
The rest of the night was essentially another party in the O\u2019Connell Center. Florida, which handed out hands and T-shirts and cut down the nets following a 34-point drubbing of Arkansas, put on another scoring display against Mississippi State.<\/p>\n
Up next<\/p>\n
Mississippi State: Hosts Georgia on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Florida: At Kentucky on Saturday.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here<\/a> and here<\/a> (AP News mobile app). AP college basketball: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll<\/a> and https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/college-basketball<\/a><\/p>\n Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GAINESVILLE, Fla. \u2013 Alex Condon scored 26 points, Xaivian Lee added 19 and No. 5 Florida celebrated its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3107,16582,83810,28,30,29,83809,83808,110,3115,3116],"class_list":["post-177289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-alex-condon","tag-billy-donovan","tag-bob-smyth","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-greg-sankey","tag-josh-hubbard","tag-sports","tag-thomas-haugh","tag-todd-golden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}