Keith Langford is growing up.

Kansas University basketball fans might be worried by some of Langford’s recent offensive performances, but the sophomore guard is not.

“I’m to a point now where if I don’t score points I should be able to do something else to help the team win,” he said. “There will be other games when I can probably pull out 18, 20 points, but if I score two and this team wins, that’s all I care about.”

Langford did, in fact, score two points in 34 minutes during Sunday’s 70-51 victory against Iowa State at Allen Fieldhouse. The 6-foot-4 Fort Worth, Texas, product — who takes an average of 11.5 shots per game — made his only field-goal attempt against ISU.

Langford said he has learned from watching KU All-America candidate Kirk Hinrich. The senior guard has struggled with his shot in a few games, but finds other ways to contribute. Case in point: Hinrich scored only five points Jan. 6 in an 83-54 victory at Iowa State, but still he earned praise from coach Roy Williams for holding ISU’s Jake Sullivan to 13 points — five under his average.

“It’s all part of maturing,” said Langford, who won’t turn 20 until Sept. 15. “I’ve seen games where Kirk scored five points, and he’s still playing harder than anybody on the court. If an All-American can not be worried about how many points he scored and he’s worried about the team winning, why can’t I?

“I think I’ve come a long way with coach Williams, not worrying about individual statistics and worrying about the team.”

Langford has scored in double figures in 22 of 25 games, but the Jayhawks are at their best when seniors Hinrich and Nick Collison are leading the offense.

Langford, who averages 15.5 points, 4.8 rebounds and 2.0 assists per game, set a career high with 27 points Jan. 25 in a 91-74 loss to Arizona. That was the 15th game in a streak of 17 games that Langford reached double figures. Since the loss to Arizona, he has averaged 11.8 points and was held to single digits twice during a seven-game winning streak.

Big-12 Conference leading and sixth-ranked KU (20-5 overall, 10-1 league) will try to extend that streak to eight games at 3 p.m. Sunday at fifth-ranked Oklahoma (18-4, 9-2).

Langford met the media Thursday — munching on potato chips and wearing a Michael Jordan jersey with another shirt wrapped around his head, turban-style — to talk about Sunday’s matchup.

Langford quipped that Senegal freshman Moulaye Niang had converted him to Islam before admitting his headgear was simply “a fashion statement.” The often outspoken sophomore, however, didn’t deliver any bulletin-board material for Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson, who recruited him out of North Crowley High.

“I have nothing but positive things to say about him,” Langford said. “It could have been a coin flip whether I was going to Kansas or Oklahoma. I really liked the coaching staff there. Coach Sampson really gave me a lot of confidence in the whole recruiting phase, but when it came down to it, coming to Kansas was the better decision for myself and it’s paid off. I’ll have nothing but smiles and handshakes for him on Sunday.”

Smiles and handshakes for the Sooners?

“I’m not a fan of the other 11 Big 12 teams,” he said. “Some teams you have more incentive to beat than others. OU is probably one of them. It’s not that I don’t like them. Any time you chose one school over another you have more incentive to beat that school to show them you made the right decision.”

Picking between the Big 12 rivals wasn’t an easy decision, but he didn’t have to make it alone.

“It came down to my mom’s influence,” Langford said. “She felt more comfortable in this atmosphere with the coaches, players and everything like that. It just goes to show she didn’t care how far I went from home. She just wanted me to be in the best environment possible.”

The Jayhawks will be in a hostile environment Sunday. Oklahoma has won 35 straight games at Noble Center.

A victory would be huge for Kansas, which has a one-game lead on OU and Texas (18-4, 9-2) in the Big 12 and a three-game edge on Oklahoma State (19-5, 8-3) with five games remaining.

“I think the pressure is on the other teams to catch up to us and to beat us,” Langford said. “We come into the Oklahoma game probably as focused as we’ve been all year. We just need to take care of business and, like coach always says, play Kansas basketball.

“If we lose, it gives us two losses and the race is wide open. But if we can win and get a couple of games up on everybody else, then that puts everybody else in a dogfight to try to get second.”

And whatever happened to the vocal Langford? Is his new soft-spoken approach part of that maturing process he mentioned, or did someone tell him to tone down his act?

“I want to save a lot of things for when we actually accomplish something,” he said. “I don’t want to say anything and then have it come back and bite me in the you-know-what. I just think I’ll save it for a big accomplishment for this team, say like an OU win or a Big 12 title.”

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Notes: Soph forward Wayne Simien (sore shoulder) was able to practice Friday and his status for Sunday’s game has not changed. Simien has told reporters he definitely will play in the game. … Daniel Gibson, a 6-3 high school junior guard from Houston, who visited Kansas last weekend, will visit Oklahoma this weekend and attend Sunday’s game. He’s said Texas remains his leader.