When Auburn most needed a win, it delivered.

Entering last weekend’s regular-season finale against then-No. 12 Tennessee, Auburn desperately needed a victory to move off the bubble and all but secure another NCAA Tournament berth. To do that, the Tigers needed to take down the third-ranked team in NET and, statistically, the best defensive team in the nation — one that held off Auburn, 46-43, a month earlier on Rocky Top.

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Bruce Pearl’s team came through this time, though, closing out the Vols down the stretch for a 79-70 win and a signature victory on the Tigers’ postseason resume.

“And now the reward for such a job well done is we get to play the 18th-best team in the country, according to the NET,” Pearl said Tuesday, referring to Auburn’s opening opponent in the SEC Tournament, Arkansas.

The Tigers and Razorbacks are set to square off Thursday evening in Nashville, Tenn., in the second round of the SEC Tournament. It will be the teams’ second meeting of the season after Auburn won the first, 72-59, at Neville Arena in early January.

While Auburn is the higher-seeded team — the Tigers earned the No. 7 seed while the Razorbacks are the 10th-seeded team in the league — Pearl’s team isn’t looking past its ultra-talented opponent, even while knowing the potentially rewarding (and simultaneously daunting) path that lies ahead at Bridgestone Arena. Depending on how the rest of the bracket shakes out in Nashville, Auburn could feasibly face four Quad 1 opportunities in as many days if it manages to make it to Sunday’s championship game, with a Friday matchup against Texas A&M, a potential semifinal against Kentucky and a final against Alabama.

All four of those teams, Arkansas included, are ranked in the top-23 in NET. If Auburn can put together a run in the SEC Tournament, it could more than double its number of Quad 1 wins on the season; the Tigers are currently 3-9 in such games.

“We’re in March now,” Auburn center Johni Broome said. “March is the best time of college basketball. We all know about March Madness, but like you said, it’s one game at a time. We still got a championship to win, or we’re trying to win. We see Texas A&M is next just by looking at the bracket, but obviously Arkansas is a good team. They’re very talented, gave us a close game at home, so we’re just taking it one game at a time. Like he said, just keep building momentum game in and game out.”

The 2022-23 regular season was a struggle at times for Auburn, particularly down the stretch as the competition ramped up. But to the Tigers’ credit, they’ve seldom overlooked their competition. As Pearl was sure to point out Tuesday, Auburn had 22 games this season in which it was the higher-rated team in NET. The Tigers won 19 of those matchups, with the only losses coming at Georgia in early January, against Memphis on a neutral court in December and at Vanderbilt last month.

“Those were the only three times where we didn’t do what the NET said we were supposed to do,” Pearl said. “It’s pretty remarkable. So, I don’t think this team — we’ve lost plenty of games, and we’ve not guarded, and we’ve not rebounded, and we’ve not gotten a good look at the end, but we’ve really not looked past anybody. So, why would we start now?”

It’s a lesson that some of Auburn’s returning players took from how last season ended. Wendell Green Jr., who was the sixth man during last year’s historic season but settled into a starting role this year and earned second-team All-SEC honors, said Auburn somewhat fell into that trap of looking ahead during last year’s SEC Tournament in Tampa, Fla. The Tigers went wire-to-wire atop the SEC and earned the top seed in Tampa, but their stay was a brief one as they fell flat against Texas A&M in the quarterfinals.

Green said “that’s not the plan this year” for an Auburn team that enters the postseason both hungry for more (the program hasn’t won an SEC Tournament game since 2019, when it won the whole thing en route to a Final Four appearance) and confident after its regular-season finale against Tennessee. While Auburn is eager to compete for a title while knowing it has a chance to improve its NCAA Tournament seeding given the path in front of it, the focus is solely on an Arkansas team that is more talented and playing better than its seeding in the conference tournament would indicate.

“Of course, you think about March Madness, but the whole year it’s always one game at a time,” Green said. “That’s the SEC. You can’t overlook anybody. So, we can’t overlook Arkansas and be like, ‘Oh, Texas A&M is next.’ We’re not doing that at all…. We see the bracket and we see who we could play, but Arkansas is the main focus right now.”

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.