Lamont Paris knows all too well that South Carolina was picked to finish 14th in the SEC in the preseason media poll. But in the last week, the Gamecocks have knocked off No. 6 Kentucky and No. 5 Tennessee.

During an interview on Sirius XM, Paris noted how the program has made the NCAA Tournament once in the last 18 seasons. It’s actually been 20 seasons, and the only one recently produced a Final Four run.

“Guys are focused on that, that’s the big-picture goal,” Paris said. “But then there’s some other things in between that if you hit some of those small markers, like I think it’s important that we did things like we got our first sweep of a team by beating Missouri a second time.”

He also noted a winning record in SEC play during the first half of the conference schedule.

“But they want to play in the NCAA Tournament, and we’ve talked about that, I don’t want to try to pretend like that’s not an ultimate goal,” Paris said.

Paris added that if South Carolina wins a few more games, it will have the “audacity” to worry about the standings. But that’s still to come.

“Our guys do want to play in the NCAA Tournament, badly, and I think you can see it just by the way that they play,” he said.