The ISU men’s basketball team got off to a fast start in conference play, but the train made a brief stop Wednesday night with a 76-69 loss to No. 9 Missouri at Hilton Coliseum.

Things won’t get much easier Saturday as the Cyclones (12-4, 2-1 Big 12) head to Lawrence, Kansas to face No. 10 Kansas in Allen Fieldhouse. Inside the “Phog,” the team will face a potential Player of the Year candidate in Thomas Robinson.

“[Robinson is] such a complete player,” said ISU coach Fred Hoiberg. “He’s really turned into one of the premiere players in the country this year, and you knew that would happen with his role increasing.

“He’s doing everything right now.”

Iowa State is no stranger to facing elite players when playing Kansas (13-3, 3-0). For the previous three years, the Cyclones saw Marcus and Markieff Morris — both now in the NBA — who saw marked success against Iowa State both at Hilton and Allen Fieldhouse.

One Cyclone knows Robinson better than anyone else on the team. Forward Melvin Ejim was a one-time roommate of Robinson’s and remains close friends with the Kansas forward, saying they “text all the time, talk all the time.”

Ejim said he expects to guard Robinson a bit — though not exclusively — and definitely knows how explosive he is.

“He’s always going hard, no matter what it is,” Ejim said of Robinson. “He’s real athletic, but the real thing is that he has a motor and he’s always trying to outwork you and just out-beast you.

“That’s a lot of what his game is — just going super hard.”

Hoiberg said defending those types of players isn’t easy, and that his team will have to step up down low if the Cyclones are going to stop Robinson.

“It’s going to be a big test for our bigs,” Hoiberg said. “Obviously, the way we handled it [against Missouri], I’m sure they’re going to go right at us.

“You have to do your work early on [Robinson]. You have to try to get him off his sweet spot. [We’ll have to] bang him around and try to get fresh bodies on him.”

The “way we handled it [against Missouri]” that Hoiberg was referring to was the 40-20 points-in-the-paint deficit Iowa State had to Missouri when the final buzzer sounded Wednesday. The Cyclones were also outrebounded 38-27, despite having a height advantage over the smaller, more agile Tigers.

Both Hoiberg and his players firmly believe that the team beat themselves against Missouri, and that had they executed as they did against Texas and Texas A&M, the result would have been different.

“You can’t be happy with coming up short without the ‘W,’ but we showed a lot of positives,” said forward Royce White. “The utmost is that we beat ourselves against the No. [9] ranked team in the nation. So you’ve got to walk away feeling good about that. If you take care of the things that are very fixable, then you win a game by not only a little margin, but maybe 10 to 15 [points].”

Hoiberg said his team reflected on the loss, but is now totally focused on preparing for Kansas while adjusting on the things that went wrong against Missouri.

He said his team needed to have two days of practice Thursday and Friday where the team was “locked in” to be ready.

“Everything you do — wins, losses — you try to learn from [it],” Hoiberg said. “I told them it should hurt, hurt bad [after the loss to Missouri]. I know I didn’t sleep well, but I woke up this morning and started thinking about the next one. I instructed them to do the same thing. You want your losses to hurt, then put it behind you and start focusing on the next one.”