The ISU men’s basketball team ended a skid Tuesday night – it had lost seven out of eight games – with a 58-51 win over NCAA tournament bubble team Oklahoma.

Now Iowa State (13-12, 4-7 Big 12) has its sights set on Big 12 title contender Kansas State.

The win over the Sooners produced a lot of positives for Iowa State, including protecting the home floor and finally getting forward Rahshon Clark involved in the offense.

“We came in with the mindset to do whatever we need to win their game,” Clark said. “We’ve lost too many games at home. We felt that by us losing at home we’re letting our fans down and letting ourselves down.”

Clark scored 10 points, all in the first half, but was the leader of a run to close the half that gave Iowa State a 15-point halftime lead.

“He was flying around and doing some things that we needed him to do,” said coach Greg McDermott. “He’s doing some nice things defensively too.”

Clark struggled early in the game, making several mistakes, and was largely ineffective on the offensive end of the floor, until a ‘pep talk’ from McDermott got him going.

“I took him out early and was hard on him,” McDermott said. “I told him you’ve got a turnover, an air ball and you ran one of our plays wrong in four minutes. I said we can’t have that out of one our leaders.”

Clark even got back to his high-flying dunking ways that have been absent for quite some time and ignited the Hilton crowd with a couple put-back throwdowns.

“It felt great to get a dunk,” Clark said. “I hadn’t done that for a while and the guys were asking me ‘When are you going to dunk again?'”

The win over Oklahoma was a good preview of what the Cyclones will see out of Kansas State. Both teams play the same type of style with suffocating defenses.

McDermott said that he was very impressed with the victory and hopes the Cyclones can keep the momentum.

“[Oklahoma’s] a good basketball team,” McDermott said. “They’re tough-minded on the defensive end, they don’t make a lot of mistakes or take bad shots. That was as good of win as we’ve had.”

The Wildcats (18-8, 7-4 Big 12) out-muscled the Cyclones in Ames during the teams’ first meeting of the year, holding Iowa State to just 16 points in the first half with a stingy defense.

If Iowa State hopes to pull off the upset in Manhattan, they will have to do a much better job defensively on the Wildcats’ top scorers.

In the first matchup, the Wildcats’ David Hoskins and Lance Harris went for 22 and 18 points respectively. Cartier Martin also went for 17, but if the Cyclones can play they way they did defensively against the Sooners – who scored just 17 points in the first half – they just might have a chance.

“We’re capable of this, but we haven’t done it consistently,” McDermott said. “It’s nice to see us put together an entire half defensively that’s as good as we’ve played all year.”

Tip-off is set for 5 p.m. Saturday.