Big runs and a big performance by the son of a Pacific Northwest hoops icon kept the Washington State men’s basketball team from snapping its now 15-game losing streak Sunday in Corvallis.

Oregon State senior guard Gary Payton II, wearing his father’s unretired-for-the-night No. 20 jersey, had a game-high eight assists and tied for a team-high 13 points to give the Beavers (17-10, 8-8 Pac-12) the 69-49 victory over the Cougars (9-20, 1-16), to keep their NCAA Tournament hopes alive.

“It was about giving that respect, and giving some for the fans,” said Payton, the son of the OSU and Seattle Supersonics legend Gary Payton Sr., in a postgame interview with the Pac-12 Networks. “They haven’t seen number 20 play in a long time, so I came out here in this last one and gave them a little bit of both.”

An early Oregon State run signaled disaster in the opening minutes for the Cougars. WSU looked poised to compete with the Beavers out of the gate, taking a 4-2 lead after the first two-and-a-half minutes, but that quickly went away as OSU then took an 18-2 run to the 11-minute mark of the first half.

OSU honored five players for Senior Night at Gill Coliseum, and the most significant of them, Payton, was trying to fill out the highlight reel in his final game in Corvallis. To cap off that 18-2 run, Payton corralled an offensive rebound on the baseline, took a dribble back toward center, and then flushed home a huge dunk that caused Gill Coliseum to erupt, something that has become a mainstay of Beaver basketball this season

“(The atmosphere is) a lot better,” WSU junior guard Ike Iroegbu told The Spokesman Review about Gill Coliseum this season. “Each year they’ve gotten a better crowd and this year, from my standpoint, it looked like it was sold out.”

WSU did a nice job of trading blows with the Beavs for the rest of the half. Right before the intermission, junior guard Que Johnson fired a pass in the low post to a wide-open Valentine Izundu, junior center, who buried a two-handed jam to set the halftime score at 35-25.

“I felt like, again, we left points on the floor, particularly in the first half,” WSU Head Coach Ernie Kent said in the postgame news conference. “We had opportunities to score, make a few more plays that would have made the game more interesting in the second half.”

Whereas turnovers hurt the Cougars in the first half, hot shooting by the Beavers buried WSU in the second. Senior forward Olaf Schaftenaar hit 3-pointers at the 17:12 and 15:56 marks of the second half in the middle of a 16-2 OSU run to parry a Cougar flurry at the beginning of the period, almost identical to the opening minutes of the game. The run put the Beavers up 53-30 with 12:26 to play.

Despite the game being pretty far out of reach with 5 minutes to go and the Cougars down by 20, Izundu used his physicality to dominate down the stretch. On one series of possessions, Izundu got called for goaltending when he swatted a shot by freshman forward Drew Eubanks on a leap that put his head parallel to the rim, and then on the other end he fought through a wrap-up by Eubanks for a two-handed slam. Izundu made the and-1 free throw to make the score 64-45 with 4:20 to play.

Hawkinson (14) and junior guard Charles Callison (13) were the lone double-digit scorers for the Cougs. Hawkinson was a rebound shy of his 20th double-double of the season, and Callison, who recently sat out four games because of a concussion, limped off the floor after injuring his right leg, but Kent said he just bumped his knee.

The Streak

The Cougars’ 15-game losing streak is tied for the longest they’ve been on since dropping 20-straight in 2000. If the Cougars lose out, they would take a 17-game skid into the 2016-17 campaign.

Next Game

WSU will have a short week headed into their final regular season game as they travel to Seattle to face Washington at 8 p.m., Wednesday, in the second basketball Apple Cup of the season. The Pac-12 Networks will broadcast the late-night matchup.

Reporting by Dustin Brennan