Lamont Paris has found the secret sauce for his South Carolina basketball team

Even if it’s just a piece of it, a share of the SEC regular season title is impressive. A share of any regular season title is a feat, but when it’s the SEC — which has six of its 14 teams ranked — it carries a little more weight.

“In my experience, the hardest thing to do is to win the regular season,” head coach Lamont Paris said. “You have to have enough wins (over) multiple days, lots of days.”

It’s been said since the beginning of the season: Paris has built something unique in his second year leading the program. He’s found the secret sauce to it all, or at least his secret sauce.

Paris has known this year’s Gamecocks were special the moment he saw them play in the Bahama Invitational last summer. It was a closed tournament, there weren’t live streaming capabilities or a way to see what was happening from outside.

That trip has been referenced by USC, both players and Paris alike, as that moment of realization. Paris saw his brand new group play a different type of basketball than what he had last season.

That was in July. It’s March now.

“I’ll be honest, there aren’t many things about this team I don’t like,” Paris said.

Following No. 18 South Carolina’s come-from-behind win over No. 24 Florida on Saturday, there’s a real chance the Gamecocks could get a share of the regular season SEC title — or even win it outright. They’re sitting in second place now, tied with No. 14 Alabama and behind No. 4 Tennessee with two games left in the year.

USC hosts the Vols on Wednesday night.

If the Gamecocks can win their remaining two games, they could earn some hats, T-shirts and a freebie into the conference tournament quarterfinals in Nashville just four days later.

“We kept saying, as you stack these things together, ultimately there’ll be a bigger prize, and the immediate bigger prize was an invitation to the NCAA Tournament,” Paris said. “That was the short term, long term prize. And having continued to do things … the other one now is that you’re looking in the face of a potential SEC regular season championship.”

Not bad for a team that was picked to finish last in the conference.

Throughout this year, South Carolina had individual players with big games. Meechie Johnson’s 29 points against Mississippi State, for example, was the highlight of USC’s first SEC win of the season. Collin Murray-Boyles’ 31 point performance against Vanderbilt is another.

In those marquee wins, however, such as Kentucky, Tennessee and now Florida, it wasn’t just one person. Multiple players excelled in their roles, regardless if USC was leading or trailing.

Paris knew those wins were moments where he felt that USC could take the title.

“There are a lot of little moments,” Paris said. “Today certainly was one of them, but I’ll be honest, I knew what our team was about. And forget winning and losing, I knew the makeup of our team way, way early … I knew we had winning guys that wanted to win.”

South Carolina’s best games this season have come when it plays together as a team. It might be pretty standard, but that’s the task at hand for the Gamecocks in their final week of the regular season: play a collective game.

The 1-3-1 zone defense has worked seamlessly, the Gamecocks are finding ways to score across the board and there’s never a go-to offensive player.

Paris can see the goal, the players can taste the crown. Tennessee’s the next step toward that goal, but they’re having fun fighting to the season’s end.

“Probably not a lot of people have said that, but there are a lot of doubts around these guys,” Paris said. “These guys have continuously risen to the occasion, and found solace within one another and belief and encouragement and they’re tough minded kids.”

Gamecocks schedule

• Wednesday vs. Tennessee, 7 p.m. (ESPN2)

• Saturday at Mississippi State, 2:30 p.m. (SEC Network)

• March 13-17 at SEC Tournament in Nashville

SEC standings