The Light Blues had slipped up in their title bid with 2-2 draws against both Dundee and Hearts in their previous two William Hill Premiership games away from Ibrox.

Derek McInnes’s side came out at The Marbill Coaches Stadium with victory as priority and striker Ryan Naderi scored with a soft penalty after 18 minutes before returning stand-in skipper Neil added a second just after the hour mark with a deflected strike.

The Ibrox side extended to 12 their unbeaten run in all competitions going into the international break and the midfielder said: “It was a big thing that we spoke about before the game, keeping a clean sheet.

“I think everyone played their part in that and yeah, it’s nice to get a win before this break.

“One of the big things we spoke about again, other than the clean sheets, is coming away from home and putting in a good performance.

“The last two away results and performances really haven’t been us. It was important that we didn’t have another one of them going into the break and have it lingering over us.

“Like I said, everyone played their part in making it a comfortable result.

“Coming away from home in any league is tough, but especially this league. The better our away form is, I think the better we’re going to stand during the season.

“It’s important that the mentality of the group is right, which it is, and I think you’ve seen that on Saturday night.

“Our home form speaks for itself but the last two away results haven’t been great for us. So it was important to put that hoodoo of those two results behind us and make sure that we won the game.”

St Mirren have won just two of their last 11 league games and sit eighth in the table but boss Craig McLeish remains confident.

He said: “I think what we’re doing, we think that that will be successful in the short term and even more successful in the long term.

“How we’re trying to play, how we’re going about things, it’s just bits of consistency.

“Again, every manager will set teams up differently and have different ways of playing. Every club will have a different philosophy and strategy of how they’re going about things and there’s a number of reasons why we’ve decided to go down this route as a club.

“Some of that’s about sustainability and developing our own player trading model.

“Some of it’s to do with entertaining the fans and it being exciting to watch and getting people in to support us.

“It’s developing our own young players. There’s a bigger goal of helping develop Scottish football.

“This is what we’ve decided to do and the club have been great with it.”