The LSU women's basketball team breezed through the first of two exhibition games it's set to play before the 2026-27 season tips off on Nov. 2.

The University of North Texas at Dallas, the NAIA school that the No. 9 Tigers invited to the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on Thursday, didn't pose much of a threat. LSU raced out to a 21-0 lead over the Trailblazers and won 159-31, posting some eye-popping numbers along the way.

And the Tigers did it with only nine of their 11 players.

Both Noa Morro and Anna Minaeva watched the game from the bench. Minaeva, a freshman center from Russia, is battling a minor quad injury, coach Kim Mulkey said, and LSU hopes she can return to the floor by Monday.

Morro, a senior forward from Spain, is still expected to miss the first month of the season as she recovers from a stress fracture she developed in her shin.

LSU wasn't at full strength, and the competition it faced was rather light, but Mulkey and her staff can still glean a thing or two from their new-look group's first taste of live game action.

Here are three takeaways from the exhibition.

Frontcourt youth

Mulkey said on Sept. 21 and Oct. 13 that she doesn't think her new LSU team has the depth that her last done did.

On Thursday, though, she offered a clarification.

"I need to quit saying we don't have depth," Mulkey said. "What we don't have is the experience.

"We have that on the perimeter. We just don't have it in the post."

Three of LSU's top four post players are new to college basketball. Mulkey and her staff know what they have in sophomore forward Grace Knox. But they're less sure what kind of production they'll wind up getting from Morro, Minaeva and Lola Lampley – a 6-foot-2 freshman beginning her career as a post player.

Morro is a 6-3 sharpshooting senior who's played professionally in Spain. Minaeva is a skilled freshman from Russia, and she's only 17 years old.

Without Morro and Minaeva, LSU started the 6-3 Knox and the 6-foot sophomore ZaKiyah Johnson in the frontcourt on Thursday. Lampley and the 6-foot sophomore Meghan Yarnevich then came in off the bench.

The Tigers' frontcourt experience took a hit when Kate Koval, a 6-5 junior from Ukraine, decided to leave the program in August.

Now Mulkey's go-to lineup may not have as much size as it usually would, at least not until Morro makes her LSU debut around late November.

"Our best team for a long period of time this year might be small," Mulkey said. "And you go with what you think is going to give you an opportunity to win until your bigs become comfortable.

“We're gonna be very, very young inside."

Florida transfer shines

Laila Reynolds, a Florida transfer, did a little bit of everything for LSU on Thursday. She tallied 20 points on 8-for-8 shooting to pair with six rebounds, four assists and four steals.

What's clear – even after one exhibition game – is that Reynolds fits in nicely at LSU. The speedy 6-foot senior is a tall, long perimeter defender who can crash the glass, force turnovers and help the Tigers score in transition.

"She's like a burst of energy," Mikaylah Williams said. "I don't know how many times y'all saw she was sprinting down the floor. We had full court passes. Like, that's something that we're gonna need."

Reynolds is one of the reasons why Mulkey thinks LSU is flush with perimeter depth. She's started 97 games across the three seasons she spent with the Gators, and the Tigers are expected to bring her off the bench.

"She's gonna wake a lot of people up this year," MiLaysia Fulwiley said.

Fulwiley catches fire

Every LSU starter posted some impressive numbers on Thursday, but none more so than Fulwiley.

The All-SEC senior guard tallied 32 points, 17 assists, seven steals and six rebounds after shooting 12 of 18 from the field and 7 of 11 from 3-point range. She didn't turn the ball over once, and the Tigers outscored UNT-Dallas by a staggering 110 points in the 31 minutes she played.

Fulwiley's performance was reminiscent of the ones she strung together at the end of her junior campaign. Across the last 10 contests LSU played in 2025-26, she averaged 19 points, 2.2 blocks and 1.7 steals per game while shooting 49% from the field and 40% from 3-point range.

Is Fulwiley's eruption a sign that she's about to carry that production over into her senior season? It very well could be.

At the very least, it shows that the former South Carolina transfer is more comfortable ahead of her second year at LSU than she was at the start of her first.

"I kind of feel like I know what needs to be done now," Fulwiley said, "and now it's just up to me to go out there and execute what my coaches need me to do.”