“I felt like we were all kind of a mess,” head coach Suzy Merchant said. “We had just had a team meeting and I was kidding around with them, but I was just talking about changing the atmosphere. I felt like everyone was so miserable. It’s just horrible to feel that way. Basketball’s supposed to be fun. This is a game they love.

“I think it started with me at the top. Quit being so negative and complaining and see what we do well and what we can adjust and fix and let’s start having a little bit of fun while we do this. Honestly, that was a little bit of the difference.”

Merchant even compared her team to Pig-Pen, the character from the comic strip “Peanuts.”

“Everywhere we went we had this cloud of crap following us and we needed to be more like anyone. You could pick Linus, Lucy, Charlie Brown, Snoopy — he seemed happy — but anybody but Pig-Pen,” Merchant said. “We had to get rid of Pig-Pen and move on to somebody else.”

And get rid of Pig-Pen they did.

“We just decided that it’s not going to be like this the whole season,” senior center Allyssa DeHaan said. “We were really optimistic and things started to turn around day-by-day.”

Since the losing streak, the Spartans have won eight of their past nine games, a run that started with a 72-54 win against Purdue on Jan. 21. The Spartans have turned that 2-5 start into a 10-6 mark with the chance to clinch the No. 2 seed in the Big Ten Tournament with a win against the Boilermakers on Thursday and a Wisconsin loss.

“That’s when we started to change our defensive focus,” Merchant said of the first Purdue game. “I think every time we’ve stepped foot on the floor, for the most part, it’s gotten better with the exception of the debacle at Iowa. I think other than that we’ve had good defensive efforts.

“We were at a tough point when this kind of started to turn. I think they were willing to hear anything and try a little extra, a little harder.”

Merchant said she probably was too hard on the team and too hard on herself during the losing streak.

“The misery these kids were in, they were not having any fun,” Merchant said.

“I was talking to Allyssa and she was like, ‘It’s just not fun.’ I was thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. This is supposed to be fun.’ That’s the one thing as a coach I felt like I’ve always created an atmosphere where kids wanted to be in the gym, they wanted to be here, that kind of thing and they weren’t doing that. I wanted to lighten the load and have a little bit of fun.”

The entire team took stock of where they were and where they wanted their season to go. At that point, MSU has defeated two top-10 teams but had dropped games to teams it had no business losing to.

“That losing streak really woke us up,” senior forward Aisha Jefferson said. “We wanted to stay positive because we’ve done good things this year. We want to stay together when things are bad and when things are good. Our whole team helped out in … staying positive.”

The Spartans look to continue their solid run Thursday when they play Purdue in West Lafayette, Ind., a team coming off a 61-57 loss to last-place Illinois on Sunday.

Thursday is Senior Night at Mackey Arena as Purdue sends off its three seniors — guards FahKara Malone and Jodi Howell and forward Laura Garriga.

Not only will the emotion of Senior Night make the Boilermakers (14-13 overall, 9-7 Big Ten) difficult to deal with, but Purdue is the only Big Ten team unbeaten at home in conference play.

“They have a different pep in their step and I’ve talked to the team about that,” Merchant said.

“I watched the Penn State game that they just played and then losing at Illinois and it was completely different. It was a different team. They have a lot more energy, they cut harder on offense, they tip more balls, get more hustle plays at home and it just seems like everybody elevates their game that much more.”

The Spartans have won two of their past three games at Mackey Arena, including a 68-62 overtime win last season and a 54-52 win in 2007 when Mia Johnson hit a 3-pointer with 1.3 seconds left to cap a 17-point rally.

“There’s definitely been some serious battles,” senior center Lauren Aitch said. “Us and Purdue have always had the same type of teams. We match up really well and it’s always been a catfight to the end.”