Conference USA men’s basketball has been a roller coaster, and Western Kentucky has had a front-row seat for the ups and downs.

The Hilltoppers entered last week at perhaps their peak, winning six straight games including back-to-back dominating home performances. One last road trip brought the Tops back down to earth with losses to Missouri State and then a regular season-ending 92-67 loss at FIU on Saturday.

“Obviously the ups and downs are dramatic,” WKU coach Hank Plona said during his postgame interview on the Hilltopper Radio Network on Saturday. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

WKU (18-13 overall, 11-9 CUSA) enters the CUSA Men’s Basketball Tournament as the No. 3 seed and will face No. 6 seed Kennesaw State in Thursday night’s 8 p.m. quarterfinal game at VBC Propst Arena in Huntsville, Alabama.

The Tops are 0-2 against Kennesaw this season, losing both regular-season matchups in January as part of a four-game losing stretch. After that, the Tops reeled off six wins in seven games to climb the conference rankings before stumbling over the last two road tests.

So there’s recent success and even more recent struggles to focus on as the Tops prep to face the Owls.

“Working finishing at the rim, working on rebounding, working on that toughness,” Plona said. “We’ve got to make a choice in the moment at all times to have a toughness and an edge to us because that’s what these games are.

“We’re not as good as we looked last week at home and we’re not as bad as we looked this week on the road. We are somewhere right in the middle of that and we have to find our humility, we have to find our inner drive, our work ethic and we have four or five days to figure out how to create a better mentality and opportunity.”

WKU opened the season with four straight wins before heading to Paradise Island, Bahamas to play in the Battle 4 Atlantis – the Tops pushed nationally-ranked Vanderbilt to the limit in a five-point loss, came up short in a 97-91 overtime decision to a strong South Florida squad and then salvaged the trip with a five-point win against Wichita State.

Then injuries, which hamstrung Plona’s first WKU squad the previous season, started to creep up. Graduate senior point guard Terrion Murdix, who missed two full seasons with knee injuries, suffered another one in the South Florida game and would sit out the next eight contests before returning to action.

Graduate senior forward Bryant Selebangue, a vital part of the Tops’ front court, was lost for the season with a torn Achilles tendon in a road loss to Marshall on Dec. 10. Two games later, fellow forward Louie Semona started experiencing back issues shortly after a last-second home loss to Tulsa – he hasn’t played since.

Leading scorer Teagan Moore sustained a concussion late in the home loss to Liberty on Jan. 21, then standout freshman guard Armelo Boone injured his ankle in practice the next day.

Boone made it back after missing two games — both losses — while Moore sat out five games.

Moore, a redshirt sophomore, sparked the Tops’ most sustained stretch of excellence when he returned with a 28-point effort in WKU’s 82-80 home win against MTSU on Feb. 14. Moore would go on to win consecutive CUSA Player of the Week honors.

The return of Murdix, stellar all-around play by senior forward Grant Newell plus the emergence of junior guard LJ Hackman also boosted the Tops’ play in a strong February.

WKU hopes that stretch wasn’t actually the high point of the season. Two years ago when Plona was the top assistant on coach Steve Lute’s staff, the Hilltoppers won three straight games to claim the CUSA tournament championship and earn a spot in the NCAA Tournament in 11 years – that team was also the No. 3 seed in the conference tournament.

Last year, the injury-depleted Tops entered the CUSA tournament as the No. 7 seed and fell to No. 10 FIU in an opening-round matchup.

The Tops will have another chance to put it all together in Huntsville, starting Thursday night.

“Home, road, neutral, it doesn’t matter – you’ve got to play the game,” Plona said. “And I think we’ve gotten to a point where I don’t think it matters a ton.”