Despite winning the Southeastern Conference regular season title, Auburn men’s basketball didn’t finish the regular season how it wanted to.

The Tigers lost their final two games, one of them being a buzzer-beater loss to archrivals Alabama at home on senior day. That dropped Auburn from the No. 1 spot in the AP poll — a position it held for the last eight weeks — and put a sour taste in its mouth heading into the postseason.

However, when speaking on the Paul Finebaum show Monday afternoon, Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl talked about how the team can make the most of the two losses to end the regular season.

“We have lost the last two games. We’re not happy about it,” Pearl said on the show. ” I hope that that carries us through the tournament, because sometimes being pissed off gives you a little bit of an edge.”

The first step of the postseason is the SEC Tournament in Nashville, a competition in which Auburn has had a history of success. The Tigers won last season’s tournament, their second under Pearl.

The postseason momentum ended there, though. Just one game after the Tigers cut down the nets in Nashville, they were upset by Yale in the NCAA Tournament, ending Auburn’s March Madness run in the first round.

While last season’s SEC Tournament-winning team had an early exit in the big dance, Pearl’s 2019 SEC Tournament-winning team went all the way to the Final Four. Pearl was asked by Finebaum about what success in the regular season can mean for the postseason, and he had his own theory.

“I’ll just use us in 2019. I had a really good team that tied for fourth in the SEC, didn’t win the league. I don’t want to say we underachieved, but we really hadn’t accomplished anything, and we got hot at the end of the year,” Pearl said. “I think sometimes the regular season champions that win a championship and grind all year long, there’s no level of satisfaction, but there’s not that desperation for, ‘Like we worked so hard, and we’ve accomplished nothing.‘”

He used last season’s Alabama team as another example. The Crimson Tide didn’t win the SEC regular season or tournament title and even lost three of their last four games going into the NCAA Tournament.

Alabama still made a Final Four run that season, and Pearl’s theory would suggest that extra desire might have had something to do with it.

Despite winning the regular season title this season, Pearl said that Auburn is “hungry” going into the postseason this year, adding that “we’ve only lost to teams that are good enough to win a national championship.”

Auburn will start the postseason Friday, as it faces either Ole Miss, Arkansas or South Carolina in the SEC Tournament quarterfinals. The game is set to tip off at noon and will be televised on ESPN.

Peter Rauterkus covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X at @peter_rauterkus or email him at [email protected]m