Auburn fifth-year senior Ja’Mya Mingo-Young said she and her teammates “got chewed out at halftime” despite their six-point lead over Arkansas.

Meanwhile, Auburn head coach Johnnie Harris made it sound a bit more pleasant.

“I just told them they weren’t playing hard,” Harris said of her message at halftime. “We weren’t playing smart, we weren’t following our gameplan, so I just kinda got after them a little bit.”

Regardless of how Harris’ message was delivered, it was received by Auburn, which outscored Arkansas by 13 points in the second half en route to a 67-48 win in the second round of the SEC Tournament Thursday night in Greenville, S.C.

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For the Tigers, Thursday night’s win not only avenged Feb. 4′s regular season loss to the Razorbacks, but it also gave Auburn its first SEC Tournament win since 2020, as well as the program’s 20th win of the season.

And the Tigers did it, essentially, without their leading scorer in fifth-year senior guard Honesty Scott-Grayson.

Scott-Grayson, who was named an all-SEC first teamer on Tuesday, entered the night averaging more than 18 points per game and logged 27 points against Arkansas back in February.

On Thursday night, however, the Razorbacks had Scott-Grayson’s number and held her to just six points on 3-for-11 shooting. Scott-Grayson’s offensive output on Thursday was the second-lowest she’s recorded all season.

“Being able to do that offensively with Honesty not having an Honesty-like game… If we’re scoring and she’s just playing, she’s okay,” Harris said of Scott-Grayson. “If she needed to take over, she absolutely would have.”

Fortunately for Auburn, there was no need for Scott-Grayson to take over as the Tigers’ bench tallied 31 points in the win.

Leading the Tigers’ offensive efforts was fifth-year senior guard Ja’Mya Mingo-Young, sophomore Sydney Shaw and junior Mar’shaun Bostic. The trio of guards logged 11 points apiece while Mingo-Young wasn’t far from a triple-double as she also tallied eight rebounds and dished eight assists in the win.

But staying true to the look of a Johnnie Harris-coached team, it was Auburn’s defense that paced its offense.

By halftime, the Tigers had forced Arkansas to commit 11 turnovers. By the game’s final whistle, that number swelled to 16 turnovers.

And off those 16 forced turnovers, Auburn scored 19 points. Meanwhile, Arkansas logged just nine points off turnovers.

“It’s a non-negotiable,” Harris said of getting her team to buy in to her style of defense. “They do not have a choice. They’re either going to defend, you’re going to play the way we tell you or you’re not going to play. They don’t have a choice and that seems to work.”

With Thursday’s win, the Tigers advance into the tournament quarterfinal, where they’ll meet a familiar foe in the LSU Tigers.

Auburn and LSU have already met twice this season with one meeting ending in a win for Auburn and one meeting ending in a win for LSU.

“I’ll tell you what, it’s pretty much the same gameplan,” Harris said of Friday’s rubber match against LSU. “We’ll tweak some things, but pretty much the same gameplan. It’s been working. But we do have to tweak some things. The way we play, that’s who we are… We’re going to have to play smarter than we did today. But that has been able to keep us in ball games, so that’s the plan.”

Auburn will take on the defending national champions in the LSU Tigers Friday at 5 p.m. in a game that’s set to be televised on SEC Network.