STARKVILLE, Miss. -- Alabama's players couldn't forget watching Mississippi State come to Tuscaloosa last season and clinch the SEC West. Given a chance at redemption, they turned the tables on the Bulldogs.
Kennedy Winston had 21 points and the 21st-ranked Crimson Tide wrapped up the division title with a 68-63 victory over the Bulldogs on Saturday in Mississippi State's worst shooting game in four years.
"I guess you could say it was a little payback," Alabama guard Earnest Shelton said. "But we weren't into that. We were just more or less trying to get a win."
Ronald Steele gave Alabama the lead for good when his 3-pointer with 2:20 left began a 9-0 run. It helped wrap up the Crimson Tide's first West crown since 2002 and kept their momentum flowing heading into next week's SEC Tournament.
Alabama enters the postseason with victories over Auburn and the Bulldogs after a home loss to third-ranked Kentucky.
"We knew we had to step up this week and get two wins because we had a battle last weekend" against Kentucky, Winston said. "We're satisfied to come over here back-to-back years and get a win."
Mississippi State tied it at 55 on Dietrich Slater's twisting layup with 2:44 left.
But Steele countered that with a 22-footer from the left wing and Alabama forced three consecutive stops to open up a 64-55 lead with 57 seconds remaining. The Bulldogs didn't get closer than four the rest of the way.
Nobody on the Alabama bench forgot about last year's meeting in Tuscaloosa when Mississippi State clinched its first outright SEC title since the 1960s with an 82-81 overtime victory. This time, a Crimson Tide loss would have given the crown to LSU.
For Crimson Tide coach Mark Gottfried, that made coming to Starkville to seal his team's second-ever West title even more satisfying.
"It's hard to do that. It's hard to get a win like that on the road against a good team," Gottfried said. "I'm just proud of our guys that they were able to win it on the road."
Steele and Jean Felix each had 13 points, and Shelton added 11 for Alabama (23-6, 12-4), which had been targeted by the Bulldogs ever since a 49-point rout last month in Tuscaloosa that was one of the worst losses in Mississippi State history.
Gottfried played his starters until the final minutes of that 98-49 rout, and some Bulldogs players vowed to settle the score this time.
Though Alabama led for most of the way, this one wasn't nearly as easy; it was tied seven times in the second half.
Lawrence Roberts had 13 of his 15 points in the second half and finished with 11 rebounds for Mississippi State (21-9, 9-7). Ontario Harper had 14, Shane Power scored 13 and Winsome Frazier added 10.
But Mississippi State shot just 30.3 percent from the field, the team's worst shooting performance since hitting 26.9 percent in a February 2001 loss at Kentucky.
"You can sum it up any way you want to sum it up -- you go 5-for-28 (from 3-point range), that's difficult," Mississippi State coach Rick Stansbury said. "You go 7-for-28, you win the game."
It was the final game inside Humphrey Coliseum for Roberts and five other Mississippi State seniors. But one of them, 7-foot center Marcus Campbell, didn't play after pulling a calf muscle during a shootaround.
That led the Bulldogs to use a smaller lineup with four players with experience playing guard. Alabama packed its zone defense around Roberts and dared Mississippi State to make shots from the outside.
For most of the way, the Bulldogs couldn't.
Mississippi State shot barely 24 percent, missed its first 13 3-pointers, went nearly 7 minutes without a field goal and trailed by as many as 10.
Alabama led just 26-22 at halftime and allowed the Bulldogs to make things interesting early in the second half.
Mississippi State trailed 30-23 before Frazier hit two straight from beyond the arc and Power added another during a pivotal 90-second stretch that tied it at 32 with 16:24 remaining.
