Columbia, Mo. ? Somewhere between the elusive truth and the undeniable consequences of yet another uncomfortable L’Affair Mizzou, Tigers basketball has stopped being a story about the here and now, and out of pure common sense needs to urgently bolt into the future.

A few weeks ago, there were plenty of reasons for Mike Anderson to keep doling out valuable playing time to his five seniors.

But all that changed the minute Anderson’s seniors got caught in a swirl of foolish lies, embarrassing suspensions and arrests from a notorious bar fight two weeks ago. While we may never know the complete truth about who or what caused the fight outside Athena nightclub, there’s no denying what their mess has done to the basketball team.

This season is toast. You could search from now until Selection Sunday and never find a bracketologist with a clue who can calculate any realistic possibilities that put the 13-11 Tigers into March Madness. And after watching them slog their way through this uneven 77-69 spanking from 18th-ranked Texas A&M Saturday afternoon at Mizzou Arena, I want you to realize that this was actually good news.

It’s good news because it just might have put Anderson into the proper frame of mind to make the rest of this season the first phase of next season.

Let the groundwork for next season begin right now. The future is now. I’m not saying wipe out all the minutes for every senior on the team, but it no longer makes sense to give senior big men Marshall Brown, Darryl Butterfield or Vaidotas Volkus major minutes at the expense of junior forward Leo Lyons or the rapidly improving freshman Justin Safford.

For all his perplexing inconsistency, on his worst day Lyons provides more of an offensive threat than Brown or Butterfield on their best days. If he’s going to have a critical role on this team as a go-to man, let it begin sooner, not later. And the more playing time the 6-foot-8 Safford gets, the more intriguing he becomes, because he is the one man on the roster who has the size, the shooting touch, the athleticism and the on-court instincts to make the handful of NBA scouts in the building Saturday scramble for their stat books to figure out why they didn’t have him on their radar.

No one’s saying he’s a lottery guy, but his 15 minutes on the floor intrigued them. With a stroke like his, and the ability to put it on the floor and create his shot in traffic, Safford is a guy who deserves increased minutes and more than a few plays that are designed to get the rock in his hands.

This was another confounding game that started off looking like the Tigers were going to upset another Top 25 team at home but ended up bad.

With important minutes going to Brown, Butterfield, Volkus and the enigmatic senior guard Jason Horton, Anderson got little in return. Mizzou was outscored 15-0 to open a disastrous second half that saw the Tigers go from a 30-25 lead to an 18-point deficit with seven minutes remaining.

What did the seniors contribute in that lifeless run? Nine points. Four rebounds. Five assists.

What the seniors turned into garbage time, the youngsters led by Safford, Lyons, J.T. Tiller and Keon Lawrence turned into quality time in the game’s last five minutes, scoring Mizzou’s last 27 points to make this game a more respectable eight-point loss.

Was it garbage time or an inspired glimpse into the future? “You saw what you saw,” said Anderson, ever the politician. “The young guys played with a sense of urgency.”

He didn’t mention the lack of urgency of the older guys, but then again, he didn’t have to.