Four days after Alabama held off skidding LSU for its 10th SEC win, the Tide will host one of the conference’s teams on the upswing Wednesday night.

Florida comes to Coleman Coliseum sitting alone in sixth place in the SEC at 6-4 and a week removed from knocking off then-No. 2 Tennessee in Gainesville. The Gators, under first-year coach Todd Golden, have moved onto the NCAA tournament bubble with a No. 43 NET ranking after sinking as low as No. 80 early in the season.

“Florida’s a very good team that’s getting better and better,” Oats said. “They’ve got a new coach, got a new system that took them a little longer to, I’m sure, learn the system they want to put in. But they know what they’re doing over there, and they’ve got players, and they’re playing their best basketball right now. So this is not gonna be an easy win at all.

“We’ve got to play better than we did Saturday.”

Florida (13-10) notched a 13-point win over Tennessee last week before losing by five points on the road to Kentucky. 6-foot-11 forward Colin Castleton enters as the SEC’s seventh-leading scorer at 15.6 points per game and its sixth-best rebounder at 7.7 per game. This will be Castleton’s third career game against Alabama after he scored 13 points with eight rebounds in 2021, and had 19 points with seven rebounds last season.

“He’s one of the best players in the league,” Oats said. “He leads their team in all major statistical categories. He anchors their defense. They have the 10th-best defense in the country on KenPom.”

One of the soft spots for third-ranked Alabama has been defending offensively-capable forwards. It allowed UConn’s Adama Sanogo and Gonzaga’s Drew Timme to have some of their highest-scoring games in early-season losses, and LSU forward Derek Fountain set a career high Saturday with 26 points.

“Charles [Bediako] has to do a good job,” Oats said. “It’s not like Charles’ length is going to bother Colin all that much. Obviously, Charles will be our first match up on him. We’re going to have to have other options. Charles has been in foul trouble in the past.

“They don’t make it easy to double [Castleton] because you don’t want to give up open threes to these shooters they’ve got on the floor.”

Gators guard Will Richard has made 41 percent of his three-pointers this season (37-of-90) and is Florida’s second-leading scorer at 10.3 per game.

In its backcourt, Alabama has seen a shift in recent games in both minutes distribution and which players have provided scoring. Freshman point guard Jaden Bradley has logged his three lowest minute totals of the season within the past four games, while Jahvon Quinerly has played at least 20 minutes in four of the past five games.

“It’s hard to balance minutes with everybody,” Oats said. “We need Jaden to be an elite-level defender. Teams have been playing off him in a little bit, and I think sometimes that might muddy up his pick-and-roll reads. We’re trying just to still have an attacking mindset. He’s a great passer. We’re trying to put him in better spots to where he can really use his passing ability.

“He’s had a good couple days of practice. I think his energy has been up. He’s one of those guys we really need to have him be an elite level defender when he’s on the floor, though, to continue to get the minutes that he’d been getting before. That’s what we’ve been telling him.”

Guard Mark Sears is averaging 9.5 points per game over the past six games after averaging 17.5 over the six games prior to that. Points instead are coming off the bench from freshman guard Rylan Griffen, who has at least 12 in the past three games on 9-of-15 three-point shooting, and Nimari Burnett, who has 29 points on 7-of-14 from deep over the past two games as he returns to full health following wrist surgery.

With a win over Florida, Alabama (20-3) can match its program-best 24-game start of 21-3 from the 1975-76, 1974-75, 1973-74 and 1955-56 seasons. It can also start 11-0 in the SEC for the third time in program history, joining that 1955-56 team that was undefeated in conference play as well as its 1946-47 team that began 11-0 in the conference.

After Wednesday night’s game, Alabama plays Saturday at unranked Auburn before traveling to Knoxville next Wednesday to face Tennessee. Win both, and the Tide will be in prime position to earn another SEC regular-season title.

“It’s a big stretch of games coming up for us,” Oats said.

Mike Rodak is an Alabama beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mikerodak.