Mark Pope issued a holiday challenge to his UK basketball team. The Cats met it Tuesday.

Basketball-wise, the Kentucky Wildcats didn’t have much to feel cheerful about over their holiday break.

Mark Pope’s team was on the wrong end of a Madison Square Garden mauling four days before Christmas, an 85-65 loss to unranked Ohio State that was stunning in its sheer one-sidedness. The Cats took a few days away from basketball, as previously planned, to be with their families and celebrate the holidays. When they reconvened in Lexington after that short time off, Pope put them to work.

“I think there was probably some point during the last week where all of our guys were struggling to remember if there was anything involved in the game of basketball except for ball-screen defense,” Pope said after Kentucky defeated Brown 88-54 in Rupp Arena on Tuesday afternoon. “We repped and repped and repped and repped and repped. And to our guys’ credit, they really worked on it.”

The work showed against the Bears.

Kentucky forced 23 turnovers against its Ivy League opponents. That’s the most by a UK foe since Texas A&M had 25 turnovers in a 100-58 victory for the Wildcats in Rupp Arena on Jan. 3, 2017, back when Bam Adebayo, De’Aaron Fox and Malik Monk were wearing the blue and white.

On this New Year’s Eve nearly eight years later, it was UK’s defensive big three of Lamont Butler, Otega Oweh and Amari Williams doing much of the denying.

Brown head coach Mike Martin said the Wildcats did a great job of making his team “uncomfortable” from the beginning, their in-your-face defense preventing the Bears from ever getting into any kind of offensive rhythm.

“I think it starts at the point of attack,” Martin said. “I mean, Butler and Oweh are terrific defensive guards. … I think their pressure at the point of their defense — and then, obviously, Williams at the back end — I think made it hard on us. They were trying to take us out of running our pindown action, our zoom action. They denied a lot of handoffs. We got a couple back cuts early, but it wasn’t enough to loosen them up.

“So I think it starts with those three guys, but I think their entire team — and then their scheme defensively — deserves a lot of credit.”

The Cats came out looking like a team that had worked on nothing but defense all week.

The first few minutes of the game were shaky from a scoring perspective, no doubt unsettling for an early-arriving Rupp crowd filled to capacity, ready to cheer on the Cats a week and a half after watching them falter in New York, only to see more of the same at the start against Brown.

Kentucky committed turnovers on three of its first four possessions. The Cats had just one basket in the first five minutes of the game. They trailed the Bears at that point, 10 days after a dreadful 17-for-57 shooting performance in the loss to Ohio State.

Things turned around quickly from there, Andrew Carr scoring seven straight UK points early in a 15-3 run that laid the foundation for a 34-point rout.

After those three early miscues, Kentucky had just two the rest of the game, the total of five a season low for the Cats, who outscored Brown 33-4 in points off turnovers. UK was 30-for-60 from the field — and 19-for-34 in the second half — with Carr leading the way with 14 points, all of them before halftime, and Oweh, Williams and Koby Brea scoring 13 apiece.

But defense was the story of this one, just as Pope would have hoped.

“I mean, that’s what we’ve been doing all week,” Williams said. “We’ve had segments where it was just 45 minutes of us working the ball-screen defense. So, just coming out and being able to do that against a different team is fun. And something we’re going to build on for the rest of the games coming up.”

Pope said his team was “brilliant” from the start of the game defensively. Just like his college coach, Rick Pitino, tracked deflections from the bench, Pope does, too. He proudly announced that Tuesday marked a season high for the Cats in that category. Pope didn’t know the final number immediately after the game, but he said the tally had reached 23 at one point in the second half.

Oweh had four steals, while Butler and Carr — an underrated defender — had three apiece. Williams blocked three shots. Brea came up with two blocks of his own, giving him five for the season. Brown ended up with a turnover on 34.3% of its possessions. The Bears’ 54 points were a season low for a Kentucky opponent.

The day before the game, Butler and Jaxson Robinson met with reporters to talk about the team’s holiday break. They both mentioned ball-screen defense over and over again. Every time someone new entered the scrum to ask what the Cats had been working on for the past week, Robinson would grin and repeat the phrase.

Carr said Kentucky’s coaches had gone over the team’s major-conference games to that point — wins over Duke, Gonzaga and Louisville; losses to Clemson and Ohio State — and some of the Cats’ defensive work had actually been quite good against high-level foes. Pick-and-roll defense was not on that list of superlatives.

“I think we’ve come a long way,” Carr said of Kentucky’s strides over the past week.

There’s still a long way to go, and there aren’t likely to be any more 34-point victories in Kentucky’s immediate future.

The SEC schedule begins Saturday, with No. 6 Florida — one of three unbeaten teams within the league — coming to Rupp Arena. A total of 10 SEC teams are in the latest AP Top 25 rankings. According to the latest KenPom ratings, 10 of the top 35 offenses in the country reside in this conference, with Saturday’s opponent sitting at No. 8 nationally.

Getting to where the Cats want to go on defense will be a season-long endeavor.

“The greatest players in the world are trying to figure out how to guard ball screens in different scenarios,” Pope said. “So this is going to be an ongoing process. But I was incredibly proud of our guys — the way they managed it tonight, I thought was elite. And their communication was terrific on the defensive end.”

Pope pointed to one play in particular that was “really exciting” for him to see from the sideline Tuesday afternoon. It involved Carr reacting the right way to a ball-screen situation from the other side of the court early in the second half, following along with something the coaches had specifically been teaching their players to do and making a deflection as a result.

“It’s little moments like that,” the UK coach said. “We’re like, ‘OK, we’re cooking.’ Like, ‘We’re getting better. We’re getting better.’ Right? That’s all we care about. ‘Can we get better?’ And these guys did.”

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