This is familiar territory for Kansas, a team that played in the Women’s National Invitational Tournament a season ago, winning one game before losing the next.

But the Jayhawks hope the similarities between last season and this current one end there. After barely missing the NCAA tournament last week, Kansas defeated Creighton 79-64 in the second round of the WNIT.

And this much quickly became clear in the moments after the victory: Kansas’ sights are set squarely on a tournament championship.

“This year’s it’s glaring. It’s staring us in the eyes,” junior forward Danielle McCray said. “Being so close to the NCAA tournament, we’re just trying to prove to the committee that we should be a team that could be in it next year and we will be in it next year.”

Last year, McCray said Kansas lacked the drive to desperately want to win the tournament. But the Jayhawks made their aspirations well-known, even in the moments following the announcement that they failed to make the NCAA tournament.

In the past week, players and coaches looked into the past for inspiration by finding teams that played well in the WNIT one season and used it as a platform to make the NCAA tournament the next.

Photo Gallery

Kansas Women's Basketball vs. Creighton

A photo gallery of the women's basketball game against Creighton on Monday night.

“Last year, we weren’t even hoping we would be in the NCAA tournament,” senior Ivana Catic. “When it didn’t work out this year, we said let’s take advantage of what we had.”

But the story of Monday night’s game lay in the first half, when Kansas started miserably before eventually finishing magnificently.

The Jayhawks appeared thoroughly uninterested in the opening five minutes. They missed open shots, turned the ball over and played rather soft and unaggressive defense. And, consequentially, Creighton began the game on a 6-0 run.

“Coming off about a week of practice with no games, it kind of showed,” McCray said. “If we play like we did tonight, we won’t have success Thursday (against Arkansas.)”

Yet Kansas flipped those trends quickly, taking control of the game midway through the first half and never relinquishing the lead.

“The game got away from us in the first half,” Creighton coach Jim Flanery said. “We missed layups and then gave up layups.”

As slow and sluggish as Kansas looked in the beginning of the game, the Jayhawks looked like a completely different team in the half’s final eight minutes. And, in many ways, they were.

Early in the game, Kansas allowed Creighton open and relatively easy shooting attempts. But the Jayhawks clamped down defensively as the half wore on. The Bluejays made just three of their 21 shots in the final 11 minutes of the first half.

Sure, Creighton missed some open looks and fumbled away some golden chances at layups, but Kansas’ defense had a lot to do with the poor shooting numbers.

“We turned up our defense and they didn’t score,” Sade Morris, junior guard, said. “We just turned up our defense.”

On the other end of the floor, Kansas executed on offense, placing scorers in more favorable positions. McCray turned in a performance that has become the norm this season: 25 points and 13 rebounds.

Morris though, regarded as Kansas’ best perimeter defender — and matched up against Creighton’s best scorer in Chevelle Herring ­­— provided a spark in a somewhat sloppy first half.

Morris scored 14 of her 21 points in the first half and continuously attacked the basket against a Creighton team lacking an inside defensive presence.

“It was just in the flow of the game,” Morris said. “When (Catic) started pushing it, I just realized how much they sucked up to her and she realized it too. We just have to do that every time.”

In the second half, Creighton managed to make the game somewhat interesting. The Bluejays cut the Jayhawks’ lead to nine on multiple occasions but never crawled over that hump.

Part of that had to do with Kansas’ defense, and part of it had to with Creighton’s shooting: The Bluejays made just 35 percent of their shots in the game.

“We just couldn’t cut that deficit,” Flanery said. “And then that’s when they finished us off.”

— — Edited by Susan Melgren