Despite the fact the Cougars scored 41 more points than the last time they were in Tucson, the No. 16/18 Arizona Wildcats men basketball team never trailed Saturday night as it rolled to a 90-66 victory over Washington State to keep the Cougars winless for the weekend in the desert.

The Cougars (9-8, 1-4 Pac-12) were competitive with the Wildcats (15-3, 3-2) for the first 16 minutes of the contest as they trailed just 32-26 with 6:35 to go in the first half, but UA proved it deserved its national ranking by finishing the last 2:53 of the opening period on an 11-3 run to take a 46-31 lead into halftime, its biggest lead of the game at that point.

“I thought we were in control of the game early in staying connected with them,” WSU Head Coach Ernie Kent said of the team’s first half performance in a postgame news conference. “Mentally we had some slippage. And they’re too good of a team to have some slippage down here in this building and on the defensive end of the floor.”

Offensive rebounding propelled the Wildcats to their 15-point halftime lead as they pulled down seven rebounds while only missing 15 of their 32 shots in the first half. Overall, UA outrebounded WSU 35-23 for the game.

“Our bigs did the best they could, but Arizona’s a really good team,” junior guard Ike Iroegbu said. “So our bigs are going to learn from this and get better for next game.”

Senior Gabe York brought the McKale Center crowd to life in an otherwise sleeper of a second half by picking off a pass by junior guard Charles Callison and taking the ball coast-to-coast and finishing off the play with a one-handed dunk over Callison. The breakaway dunk made the score 56-33 with 17:33 to play.

This contest featured the Pac-12’s top two rebounders in WSU junior forward Josh Hawkinson and UA senior forward Ryan Anderson, but neither could crack the double-digit mark in boards. Both finished the game with eight, and even though he scored 12 points, Hawkinson saw his school-record 11-game double-double streak come to an end. Anderson was the game’s top scorer with 15 points on 6-7 shooting.

UA sophomore guard Parker Jackson-Cartwright put together a nice game as well, tallying a game-high seven assists and three 3-point field goals (he only attempted four).

In postgame interviews, both players and coaches talked about how tough it is to play in the McKale Center in front of 14,000 screaming fans, but Callison seemed to deal with the distractions well. He tied Hawkinson with 12 points as the team’s second leading scorer in his third double-digit performance in the last four games.

“It was basically just a mental thing for me, staying poised, because I knew the crowd was going to get into it and I knew the team was going to feed off the environment,” Callison said. “We just had to stay poised throughout the whole game and we couldn’t do that, and we just broke down mentally.”

The Cougars have lost their last three games against the Wildcats by at least 24 points and have not beaten Arizona since 2010.

WSU will return home from its first true road trip of the season to face Utah at 8 p.m. Thursday on FOX Sports 1, and Colorado at 6 p.m. Saturday on the Pac-12 Networks.