Wichita ? Wichita State followed its 9-0 start with a 1-6 free fall, and suddenly the early season’s hottest mid-major seemed more like a flavor of the week than a contender to go deep into the postseason.

But with the Shockers coming off back-to-back wins for the first time since that early streak, things could be turning around for a team that was ranked as high as No. 8 in December.

“I’ve told the guys all along that there’s a good team in here somewhere,” coach Mark Turgeon said late last week. “We just have to find it.”

Wichita State (12-6, 3-4 Missouri Valley) dropped four of its first five conference games before beating Evansville 69-56 on Saturday and Creighton 62-59 on Monday night.

“It stinks losing, period, whether it’s one game, five games, whatever,” said senior center Kyle Wilson, who has 44 points in the last two games, including a career-high 25 against Creighton. “But it’s going to show how tough we are, when we bounce back from this and get back to playing Shocker basketball like we know we can.”

When Wichita State was on, the Shockers seemed capable of beating anyone.

They won at George Mason, then-No. 6 Louisiana State and then-No. 15 Syracuse on successive Saturdays. But they’re 0-for-3 on the road in the Valley, with losses at Southern Illinois, Missouri State and Indiana State and a home defeat by Northern Iowa.

“The last couple of weeks have been tough on us,” Wilson said after the Evansville game. “We’ve been trying to figure out what’s going wrong, trying to get better, watching a lot of film. Everybody on the team’s been a little frustrated with how we’ve been playing.”

Then again, the Missouri Valley, which landed a record four teams in the most recent NCAA tournament, isn’t a fun place to go on the road.

Wichita State's Kyle Wilson goes up for two of his 25 points againt Creighton on Monday. After a crippling midseason funk, the Shockers are looking to get rolling again as Missouri Valley Conference play heats up.

“As you look at WSU, they’ve gone to Southern and gone to Missouri State – and nobody has won at those places yet,” Creighton coach Dana Altman said Tuesday, during the Missouri Valley coaches’ weekly conference call. “They lost a home game to Northern Iowa, and Northern’s a good team. They lost at Indiana State, and they hadn’t lost at home until Bradley beat them the other night.”

It would be unfair, Southern Illinois coach Chris Lowery said, to focus solely on what Wichita State did wrong during its slump.

“The biggest problem is that people don’t respect our league,” Lowery said. “They played great teams in nonconference, but now they’re getting into a league where people have scouted them hard and know them well.

“Anything can happen, especially with having to go on the road right away.”

That didn’t make the skid any easier on Turgeon, a confessed worrier.

“I don’t like being mediocre,” he said. “When my team’s not playing well, I take it personally. If you had to live in my house, you have to understand that I’m blaming one person in the house, and it’s me.

“I got all the credit last year when we went to the Sweet 16, so I should get the blame when things aren’t going well.”

The players bear a share of the responsibility too, though, guard P.J. Couisnard said.

“Everybody’s had to look at themselves, look in the mirror after every practice and every game and ask, ‘Did we give it all today?”‘ Couisnard said. “That’s how it was in the beginning, and I think we’re starting to get back to that.”

Through the slump, Turgeon said, he stayed positive with his team.

“I told the guys, ‘I don’t think any differently of you than when we were 9-0, and I don’t think any differently of me,”‘ he said. “I just want to get it going, and we’ve got a lot of basketball left.”

Turgeon’s peers around the conference expect the Shockers to be in the title hunt, especially with three of their last four games at home.

“You have to give them credit for what they did early in the season,” Missouri State coach Barry Hinson said. “We’re all going to hit lulls here. But they’re going to run off a bunch of wins and be back in the race. They’ve got one of the finest coaches in the country and a fine group of young men.”