The point of Georgia Southern’s men’s basketball game Monday night against Brewton-Parker, a lower-level NAIA team from Mount Vernon, was for the Eagles to have a game in which to bridge the gap between opponents Auburn and Elon.

The non-conference game served its purpose. A Hanner Fieldhouse crowd of 1,247 watched as GSU (4-8) cruised to a 88-60 victory over Brewton-Parker (5-7) and snapped a four-game losing streak.

The win helped to soothe some of the sting from GSU’s 78-75 loss at Auburn on Friday night, an opportunity the Eagles squandered after leading by as many as 14 points.

More importantly, GSU’s game against Brewton-Parker kept the Eagles fresh heading into their next two games on the road. GSU will play at Elon at 7 p.m. Thursday and at Davidson at 3 p.m. Saturday.

“It definitely still hurts,” GSU head coach Charlton Young said of the loss to Auburn. “I’m not going to lie to you. A couple of times on the bench (against Brewton-Parker), I turned to my assistants and said ‘Man, we should have beat Auburn.’ We’ve got to learn from it and move forward. I think we learned some valuable lessons about becoming closers.

“When you have somebody down on the mat and you smell blood, you’ve got to go after it. I think the great basketball teams do that. This game here was about learning how to close. It wasn’t about whether we were going to win or lose. It was about trying to be dominant.”

Brewton-Parker had no answer for GSU senior guard Willie Powers III, who scored 11 points and had 11 assists. It was the third double-double of his career, and he tied his career high for assists.

The Barons also could not stop GSU sophomore forward Eric Ferguson, who scored a game-high 17 points. GSU sophomore guard Jelani Hewitt had 14 points, senior guard Ben Drayton III chipped in 13 points and sophomore guard Tre Bussey came off the bench and added 11 points.

GSU produced its best half of shooting this season in the first half. The Eagles were 17-for-24 (70.8 percent) shooting from the field against the Barons, who were 9-of-23 (39.1 percent) shooting.

“Our focus was just to come out here and just play hard, and work on the things that we had messed up in the Auburn game,” Ferguson said. “We wanted to come out here with a lot of energy so we can get our confidence up and be prepared going into this weekend with these Southern Conference games.

“We’ve got a chip on our shoulder because we believe that we should have won the game (against Auburn). We’re just going to carry it over to these SoCon games.”

Brewton-Parker was led by Darrie Stephens, who scored 14 points. Wendell Williams had 10 points.

Noell Barnidge can be reached at (912) 489-9408.