The buzzer sounded and the crowd at Colonial Life Arena swelled, celebrating a two-point win over Tennessee that put the Gamecocks firmly on the bubble and in the thick of an at-large bid for the NCAA tournament.

As the two teams converged to shake hands in the midst of the pandemonium, Rick Barnes spent a little more time than usual with Maik Kotsar.

For Barnes, this wasn’t a chance to chide Kotsar, who had just sunk four straight free throws to beat the Vols, but a chance to share how much Barnes appreciated his game.

“I told him I love him. I don’t know if we’ll play against him again. I’ve enjoyed competing against him as much as I have anyone we’ve played in my time at Tennessee because of how much he’s developed and how much he works and stretched his game,” Barnes said. “To me he’s turned into what I think Frank wants in a player.”

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To understand how Kotsar got to that moment where he makes the biggest shots of the game in a contest the Gamecocks desperately needed, you have to go back almost a year to the summer before his senior season.

The Gamecocks had just finished a 16-16 season where they didn’t make either the NCAA Tournament or NIT and it was a season to forget for Kotsar on one end of the court.

To say the then-junior struggled mightily offensively would be an understatement: he’d average just 6.7 points on 43.8 percent shooting and went through a stretch in February where he went 5-for-26 from the line to end the year.

“It was tough mentally with a few injuries here and there I had to overcome,” Kotsar, who sat out two games with a concussion, said. “I feel like my mental side of things wasn’t strong enough. That’s something I worked on this summer and tried to get better.”

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What came next was the mental reset Kotsar needed to get back on the track that’s ultimately led him to where he’s at now.

Flights to Kotsar’s hometown of Tallinn, Estonia aren’t cheap and aren’t short. Most flights there out of Columbia are close to 30 hours and include two different stops: one to a major hub like Atlanta or Orlando and another in Europe in Istanbul, Amsterdam or Brussels.

But the time was worth it for Kotsar, who got a chance to spend some time with his family for the first time in a long time with it really hard for foreign-born players to get home on a whim.

While at home, he was able to speak to his family and reset, getting some advice before coming back for his senior season. Once he got back, there were long conversations with sports psychologists and the Gamecock coaching staff figuring out what to do moving forward.

“I’ve been trying to talk to different people and trying to make my conclusions on last year from what I did wrong and what I did right,” Kotsar said. “This offseason has been the most I’ve put into my mental health and mental preparedness since forever.”

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The message? It was a simple one.

“The main thing for me is to not overthink it, not over analyze,” Kotsar said. “I get into my own head a lot sometimes and start to overthink it. If I miss a shot then I start to think a lot about it and it snowballs.”

He took that and has parlayed that into one of the best senior years under Frank Martin. Kotsar’s currently averaging 10.4 points, a career high, and has his best offensive rating of his career as well.

He looks better and more confident as he leads the Gamecocks closer to a potential tourney berth.

If he does, his four free throws will be one of the biggest reasons why. And he did it with Sindarius Thornwell, PJ Dozier and Chris Silva sitting a few feet away.

“It’s funny in a hard game like this that means a lot to our team right now that their teammate, who used to never make free throws, had the courage to go to the line and win this game for us,” Martin said. “With his guys, the guys he went to a Final Four with, sitting there with him. That made those three guys proud of who Maik Kotsar has become.”