Kim Mulkey is right about South Carolina. Good luck stopping Dawn Staley's Gamecocks | Toppmeyer

Unfortunately for Kim Mulkey’s LSU Tigers, their coach was right about South Carolina. The Gamecocks are in a class of their own.

Mulkey spent the past few weeks preceding Sunday’s collision of undefeateds convincing us that No. 1 South Carolina remains women’s basketball’s undisputed juggernaut.

“Nobody is capable of beating them,” Mulkey said in January. “They're that good. You just hope that you can stay close.”

Mulkey later doubled down.

"No one is on their level," she said days before Sunday's tip-off.

Indeed.

South Carolina bullied No. 2 LSU in the paint and on the glass in a 88-64 pasting at Colonial Life Arena during which Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks (25-0, 12-0 SEC) looked every bit as invincible as Mulkey had promised.

National championships aren’t awarded in February, and a hot shooting performance from an opponent in an NCAA Tournament game can interfere with greatness. A few teams, including Final Four contenders Stanford and UConn, played South Carolina to single-digit margins.

But South Carolina’s rout of LSU (23-1, 11-1) affirmed why Mulkey is a proponent of the Gamecocks' chance to become the sport's first repeat national champions since Geno Auriemma’s Huskies won four straight titles from 2013-16.

"I'll give my utmost respect and comments about how good they are, how big they are, how tall they are," Mulkey said after her team lost for the first time in nearly 11 months.

In less than two seasons, Mulkey transformed a perennial underachiever into a team good enough to win 23 consecutive games, but four quarters in Columbia, South Carolina, illustrated the gap that remains between the defending national champions and the SEC’s second-place team.

I thought Mulkey might have intended her pregame flattery of South Carolina as a rope-a-dope.

Athletes are motivated by doubters, and when your own coach belittles your team’s chance to beat an opponent, that can become high-octane fuel.

No amount of gamesmanship, though, would remedy this physical mismatch, and a home crowd of 18,000 ensured that the intimidation extended beyond the court.

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South Carolina’s missed shots often merely prolonged their offensive possessions. The Gamecocks missed 26 field-goal attempts. They grabbed 14 offensive rebounds.

What made their plus-18 rebounding advantage especially jarring was that was still a few rebounds shy of matching their season average.

South Carolina’s bruisers Aliyah Boston and Kamilla Cardoso established the paint as their protected domain. The Tigers ventured near the rim at a risk and were fortunate to emerge with their ego intact.

Boston bottled up LSU’s sassy superstar Angel Reese, who came up short of a double-double for the first time this season.

During one possession late in the third quarter that embodied the day, Reese tried posting up Boston, but the reigning national player of the year suffocated Reese’s shot for a jump ball.

Reese sat out six minutes in the first half after she picked up her second foul in the first quarter when she unnecessarily jostled with Boston in the backcourt. Reese scored all but three of her 16 points after halftime. Her rebound and assist to Jasmine Carson for a fast-break layup briefly brought LSU to within six points in the third quarter, before the Gamecocks poured it on.

Alexis Morris, Reese’s usual sidekick, assumed the lead role with a game-high 23 points. She made fearless drives into a South Carolina defense that few of her teammates successfully penetrated.

But LSU needed more than Morris’ gutsy performance to dethrone a team with as much depth of talent as South Carolina possesses.

Five Gamecocks reached double figures. No one was better than Cardoso, USC’s 6-foot-7 center who guarded the rim like it was her private sanctuary. Eighteen points, 13 rebounds, three blocks and 21 minutes as a buzz saw in the paint.

“She's a separator,” Staley said.

Mulkey won three national championships at Baylor, and her homecoming to her native Louisiana restored instant credibility to LSU. She upgraded the roster and seized talented transfers, like Reese from Maryland, Morris from Texas A&M and Carson from West Virginia. But LSU doesn’t possess anyone as imposing as Boston or Cardoso.

Together, they made for a unpleasant day on the visitors.

“They’re relentless,” Staley said of her veteran post combination, during an in-game interview with ESPN.

Staley’s whole roster played that way Sunday.

Consider Mulkey unsurprised.

She predicted this, after all.

"It's South Carolina, in my opinion, and everyone else,” Mulkey said. “After playing them today, my opinion on that has not changed.”

To hear Mulkey tell it, everyone else is playing for second place, and to watch Sunday’s game was to become convinced that’s true.

Blake Toppmeyer is an SEC Columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @btoppmeyer.

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