COLUMBIA, Mo. — They stormed the court named for "Stormin’" Norm Stewart, the coach who hates Kansas enough not to spend a dime in it.

Missouri spent, instead, 38 minutes and 13 seconds in front of the No. 1 Kansas Jayhawks and beat ’em on Sunday, an upset for the ages: unranked Mizzou taking down top-ranked Kansas.

The final score in the 271st Border War: MU 76, KU 67.

It was close near the end, closer than it had been for much of the game, but the Tigers’ student section had packed the perimeter of the court before the final buzzer sounded and flooded the floor in celebration.

“I got upset at the (announcer’s) table for making an announcement to tell our fans not to rush the court,” Missouri coach Dennis Gates said. “You got to be kidding me. I was about to, in-game, take the mic and say, ‘Rush the damn court!’ For real.”

Fans followed through, packing the hardwood between Mizzou Arena’s stands to capacity — with some then lifted above the happy horde.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day in Columbia. The last time the Tigers beat the Jayhawks was in 2012, the last Big 12 matchup between the rivals that was played in CoMo. Missouri’s last win over a top-ranked team was in 1997, when it upset another KU team ranked No. 1 at the time.

That year, MU needed double overtime to come out on top. This time, it needed less than two minutes of game time to take a lead it would never relinquish.

Forward Mark Mitchell and guard Tamar Bates — two players from Kansas City, Kan. — combined for the Tigers’ first two buckets, and they wound up as the leading scorers. Bates scored a season-high 29 points as the offensive catalyst, shooting 9 for 15 from the field and a perfect 9 for 9 at the free-throw line. Mitchell wasn’t quite as efficient but posted 17 points, including eight from the charity stripe.

When the Jayhawks closed to within two points with two minutes and 20 seconds left in the game, Mitchell hit a corner 3 to restore the hosts’ cushion and fend off a furious rally.

Mizzou led by 14 points at halftime, a byproduct of some dismal KU offense: The Jayhawks had 15 turnovers and only 10 made shots through the first 20 minutes of the game.

The Tigers’ advantage swelled to as much as 24 in the opening stages of the second half, only for the MU offense to go dark in turn. Nearly seven minutes without a point aligned with a 15-0 run in Kansas’ favor as the Jayhawks nearly closed the gap completely. With 14:15 on the clock, Missouri led 57-33. With 3:20 remaining, it was up just 62-57.

Teetering on the verge of a blown victory, Mizzou looked a bit like its past self — a team that gave out second-half runs to any opponent that could use one during its winless run through SEC play.

But that seemed a distant memory amid Sunday’s celebration.

“What we’ve done since we got together in June and what we’ve worked on, our guys never severed, never went their different directions,” Gates said. “They stayed connected. They stayed true to the scouting report. They challenged each other, and those that were challenged responded in the right way.”

To perhaps add to Mizzou’s glee at beating its most despised rival, the upset set off what amounts to an identity crisis for a Kansas team that lost twice this week: to Creighton by 13 points and now to the Tigers.

“I don’t think the loss hurts,” KU guard David Coit said. “It’s the way we lost that’s frustrating. ... I think our identity was challenged today.”

“I don’t know that we’re close to finding an identity,” added Jayhawks coach Bill Self, the target of more than a few middle fingers and unprintable chants from the crowd. “Because who are we? ... I’ll be honest with you: I think right now, we’re in a situation that it’d be hard for me to say, from game to game, what we are.”

Self said that he didn’t think Kansas was ready for what it encountered in Columbia, in terms of both the pressure created by Mizzou and its crowd and the sizable difference between this MU team and those that had lost to the Jayhawks in each of the past three seasons.

Missouri has a center in Josh Gray who held KU’s Hunter Dickinson in check and contributed to the star big man’s seven turnovers. Bates and point guard Anthony Robinson II stole the ball five times each. There’s a length, physicality and quickness to how the Tigers are defending these days.

“I think it was probably a combination of them being good and us not being good,” Self said. “I don’t know that I could give them 100% credit. ... I would err on the side of giving them more credit because if I say we just sucked, that would take credit from them. But we did suck.”

Words that are music, undoubtedly, to a Missouri fan's ears.

Gates thought of them while celebrating the kind of victory that will be remembered for a while.

“I want to see live video in people’s living rooms,” he said. “That’s what I want to see. Because I’m sure — I’m sure — on Kansas’ side, some people broke TV screens. And on our side, we broke ceilings by jumping up and down. That’s what it’s about. That’s the rivalry. It’s not just in this moment or the people that’s here. It’s the people that can talk about, the people that can brag.”

Sunday was the day the Jayhawks went down and the crowd crashed onto the court because they finally had a reason to rush the floor. It was the day that defense unseated a confident team, timely offense survived a desperate rally and a guy from Kansas put up 29 points to beat a team he was fired up to play against.

“You don’t got to go far to win big-time basketball games and play big-time basketball,” Bates, now in the history books as a Beaker-beater, said.

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