With the league so bunched together in the middle, January has become “separation month” for head coach Suzy Merchant as her team looks to climb back into the league race, starting with tonight’s 7 p.m. matchup against Wisconsin at Breslin Center.

“We have Wisconsin and then at Penn State. That’s as tough as it gets coming off Ohio State,” Merchant said. “I think every game is going to be extremely competitive. These next three weeks are going to be big for everybody to see where we all pan out, stack out. The good thing is, is that (in terms of) the RPI of our conference in the past, there’s been a few teams that have maybe hurt us. Now you don’t have that. There won’t be a bad loss in our league.”

Although there might not be bad losses in terms of which team MSU loses to, there certainly will be tough losses. One of MSU’s three league losses came at the hands of the Badgers (Dec. 28 at Kohl Center), a game in which junior guard Cetera Washington said Wisconsin “kicked our butts.”

“We know they’re a very physical team,” Washington said.

“As guards, when we were down there, we didn’t attack, and they took away our space, and we didn’t react to that. We just have to get into them, get them into foul trouble, which is something we focused on a lot in the last few practices.”

Coming off the holidays, the Spartans (11-5 overall, 2-3 Big Ten) turned the ball over 26 times and were down by as many as 16 in the second half before staging a mini-rally before falling 62-54.

“The biggest thing with Wisconsin is their physical play, how hard they play, the physicality of the game,” Merchant said. “We have to handle that better. We had 26 turnovers last time and probably 10 of those were our boneheaded, not focused-type situations. So we’re going to have to clean that up, and just know we have a very good defensive team coming in here, so we’re going to have to play at a high level offensively.”

What MSU didn’t do — attack and be physical — in that game, the Badgers (13-4, 3-3) did, shooting 34 free throws to MSU’s 17. But Wisconsin kept the Spartans in the game by making only 18 of them.

The Dec. 28 game, though, was not a fluke. The Badgers have had success against the Spartans as of late, winning 4-of-5 in the series, including a 56-50 win in the Big Ten tournament last season. Prior to the current run, MSU had won eight straight against Wisconsin.

“Basketball is always a game like that, where certain teams are going to do things that bother you,” junior forward Kalisha Keane said. “With them, it’s their physicality, their quickness, that kind of stuff. It’s just how you respond the next time around, how you deal with it.”

As it stands now, the Spartans have some serious ground to make up during the 10-game stretch starting now and ending prior to the team’s next meeting with Ohio State, which comes Feb. 21 in Columbus, Ohio.

“It’s a tough league,” Merchant said. “We’ve had one bad loss, and that’s Indiana at home. Wisconsin is a good team, and they beat us. Ohio State is a good team, and we could’ve beat them. It was down to the wire. When you really look at it, I don’t think it’s a time to panic, I don’t think it’s a time to fret, I don’t think it’s a time to worry, I just think it’s the grind of the season and everybody’s in it.”