Last season seven SEC teams won more games than they did in 2014.

Three remained unchanged and four regressed.

What will 2016 hold?

Let’s take a look at the three best candidates (teams or players) to have a significantly better season and three that will consider 2015 the good old days. South Carolina and Kentucky are obvious choices for improvement, so we’ll exclude both from the conversation, which focuses on the SEC’s upper echelon.

Better in 2016

Texas A&M

The Aggies went 8-5 last season, matching their 2014 record. With several stars returning and the quarterback carousel solved, these Aggies have a realistic chance of reaching 10 wins and perhaps matching the 11-2 mark set in their 2012 SEC debut.

That was the Aggies’ only 10-win season in the past 20 years.

The schedule will help. Three of their four SEC road games are winnable: at Auburn, South Carolina, Mississippi State. Three of the most difficult games are at home (against Tennessee, Ole Miss and LSU).

LSU

LSU fired the last coach who went three consecutive seasons without winning 10 games.

The Gerry DiNardo era ended in 1999 after a 9-3, 4-7, 3-8 collapse. Nick Saban was hired in 2000, and the Tigers soon again had teeth.

Saban actually had three seasons in which he failed to win 10 games, but never two straight.

This is Les Miles’ second such two-year dip.

In terms of expectations and goals, reaching 10 wins this season is on par with properly buckling a chinstrap.

Nothing is easy in the SEC, but nobody returns more starters, more talent than Miles’ Tigers, starting with Heisman favorite Leonard Fournette.

The program record is 13 wins. The playoffs now offer the chance for 14 or 15 wins. That’s the goal for this group.

Tennessee

It seems silly to suggest a team that lost four games was four plays from going undefeated, but in Tennessee’s case, it’s true.

They lost in overtime to Oklahoma, by one at Florida, by four against Arkansas and by five at Alabama.

Butch Jones, master of the ABCs (Always Be Coaching), took it a step farther. The Vols’ final loss in 2014 was by eight to Missouri.

So he came up with a “25 points” mantra and challenged his team to find them.

“The last 18 games, we’re 13-5 in our program, and those five losses have come by a combined total of 25 points,” Jones told 247Sports and others. “So we’re working for those 25 points in everything that we do — in the classroom, in academics, in our strength and conditioning program, with everything. That’s kind of been the rallying cry.

“We’ve talked about working hard towards those 25 points.”

Worse in 2016

LSU RB Leonard Fournette’s rushing total

Everything is relative, and Fournette nearly set the SEC single-season rushing record last season. He might have, too, had the Tigers’ opening game not been canceled.

Fournette finished with an LSU record 1,953 yards in 12 games. (Derrick Henry ran for an SEC record 2,219 in 15 games.)

LSU will be better served in 2016 if Fournette’s rushing total drops to around 1,500 and he and others become more involved in the passing game.

The scariest sight in the SEC might be Fournette catching a swing pass with a blocker in front.

Fournette can only get to 2,000 rushing yards if LSU stays in ground-and-pound mode, and we know how that story ends.

Florida

The Gators surprised everyone last season, crushing Ole Miss and Georgia en route to winning their first SEC East crown since Tim Tebow left town.

Jim McElwain won 10 games, the first coach in program history to do that in his debut season.

The 2016 schedule is favorable, especially compared to Tennessee’s, but capturing another SEC East division title seems out of reach, even if 10 wins seems possible.

The Gators lost six defensive starters — their strongest unit in 2015 — a 1,000-yard rusher and perhaps their top receiver/returner in suspended Antonio Callaway. Callaway missed all spring and it’s unclear when or whether he’ll return to the program.

Upgrades in the kicking game and at quarterback will improve the offense, which averaged just 12.8 points in the final six games last season.

Mississippi State

The Bulldogs won 19 games the past two seasons — the most in any two-year stretch in program history.

They need eight wins in 2016 for the best three-year stretch (currently 26, which they just reached, matching the 1998-2000, 1939-41, 1940-42 stretches).

Can they get there? Given the obvious hole at quarterback — the single biggest position to fill in the entire league — it seems unlikely.

Home games against South Carolina and Arkansas are must-wins and likely will be the difference in a 6-6, 7-5 or 8-4 regular season.