AUBURN | Auburn has lost two-straight games and is just 1-4 in conference road games. That’s not a good combination heading into Saturday morning’s game at Vanderbilt, where the Tigers haven’t won since 2000.

But Bruce Pearl has a three-point plan to get Auburn back on track, and it starts, of all places, on offense. The Tigers are one of the SEC’s highest-scoring teams averaging 82.4 points per game, but fell far short of that mark in a 60-55 loss to Ole Miss Wednesday.

“We’ve got to value possessions more,” Pearl said. “It becomes even more challenging up there because I don’t have as much, kind of, control of my offense. We played very, very hard against Ole Miss defensively. We guarded them throughout the clock. They made five or six shots at the end of the clock. And that’s why they were able to come in here and win.

“But we wore ourselves out guarding them and then on the offensive end we were sloppy, and we didn’t put forth the effort and the energy required to be able to get better looks and shoot a better percentage.”

The second part of the plan is just to continue to put forth the effort on defense. Auburn is second in the SEC with 218 steals and leads the conference with a +5.0 turnover margin.

Lastly, Pearl needs more production from Auburn’s bench. The Tigers’ bench has averaged a paltry 13.0 points in the last two games including 11 against the Rebels.

“It's not fair to Bryce Brown, or Jared Harper, that if they don't play well, we don't win,” Pearl explained. “Your best players, sometimes, are gonna have a night off, where they're not making good shots, or they're not engaged defensively or, just it's not there. They don't have that same energy. Or they're dealing with an injury. We still have to be able to win those games, and to do that, we've got to have more contributions from our bench, and it's been limited, the productivity we've gotten off the bench, particularly in the backcourt.”

Auburn enters the game 16-8 overall and 5-6 in the conference while Vanderbilt is 9-15 and 0-11. The Commodores lost freshman guard Darius Garland, a potential lottery pick, to a season-ending knee injury in November.

“So there’s a lot of talent there, and they’re very well-coached. They’ve just lost some close games that they probably could’ve, should’ve won,” Pearl said.

Tip-off at Memorial Gymnasium is scheduled for 11 a.m. CT on ESPNU.