“We just met and talked about what we wanted to do,” junior forward Delvon Roe said. “Were we just going to give up, or are we going to make a commitment?”

The verdict?

“We talked about making a commitment for the next five weeks of just making basketball the most important thing to you,” Roe said. “It was really sincere. Everybody talked about things they wanted to improve, things that are slacking or lacking.”

Izzo said the loss to Hawkeyes on Wednesday in Iowa City, Iowa was one of the few times in his career that MSU just gave up, and he wanted to make sure in the meetings that wasn’t going to happen again.

And rather than continue to get caught up in the Spartans’ shooting woes or breakdowns on offense, Izzo said it’s time to get back to doing what MSU does best.

“Somewhere in there, we lost the staple of what we do,” Izzo said. “We defend and we rebound and we run. We’ve not defended very well, we’ve rebounded OK and we’ve not run very well. And that’s what we’re going to focus on.”

The last time the Spartans and Badgers met, Izzo said MSU did a good job of all three on the way to a 64-61 overtime win.

Senior guard Kalin Lucas said the Spartans focused on defense in their meetings in hopes of having a repeat performance at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Kohl Center in Madison, Wisc.

Lucas said the best motivator for him and his teammates was watching film of MSU’s victory last year at Purdue.

“It was way different than the defense we’re playing right now,” Lucas said. “Guys were helping out … We just have to get our principles back and get back to playing defense.”

Now as MSU prepares to go on the road for the second time this week, Izzo made his request to his players for how to respond and perform Sunday about as simple as he could.

“That they play a hell of a lot better than they did on Wednesday,” Izzo said.