Kentucky coach John Calipari hates coaching against Tony Barbee.

Partly because he doesn’t like trying to beat the player whose Indianapolis living room he frequented on recruiting trips, the one who played at Massachusetts for him, then coached under him with the Minutemen and at Memphis.

And partly because he knows what kind of game to expect more times than not from a Barbee-coached team, a game that’s tight to the end, no matter the other factors involved.

“At one point I said to my staff, 'This isn't about X's and O's, boys,’” Calipari said. “‘We could be going down.’”

That’s how it looked with Auburn nursing a 2-point lead and generally outplaying a superior Kentucky team with 10:52 in front of a sellout crowd of 9,121 at Auburn Arena on Wednesday night.

But the Wildcats found their footing right about as the Tigers lost theirs, seizing control of the game, exerting their will inside and running away with a 68-53 win that was closer than the score indicates.

The Tigers (10-6, 0-2 SEC) scored only 6 points after two Rob Chubb free throws put them up 47-45 with 10:52 to go, knocking down only 2-of-11 shots down the stretch.

Auburn held a 31-15 rebounding edge at one point over the taller Kentucky (16-1, 2-0) squad, only to have the Wildcats grab 14 of 18 rebounds down the stretch.

The Tigers had an impressive amount in the tank — especially following two awful showings on the road — but it just wasn’t enough.

“Moral victories only get you so far, but it shows the direction we need to be moving,” said Chubb, who finished with a team-high 14 points and eight rebounds. “We did take a big step forward today. We showed ourselves what we could do.

“Hanging to two points with five minutes left with the No. 2 team in the nation, that’s saying something.”

If only they could have held on a little longer.

Kentucky started the deluge with an Anthony Davis follow to tie the game at 47, then two Marquis Teague jumpers to stake the Wildcats to a 51-47 lead with 6:05 to go.

As Auburn struggled to find offense, Doron Lamb and Darius Miller hit back-to-back 3-pointers to build the lead to 57-49 at the 3:37 mark.

Davis definitively slammed the door shut on an alley oop from Lamb with 1:30 to go, building the Wildcats’ lead to 62-51 and serving as the exclamation point to a 23-6 Kentucky run to end the game.

Davis finished with 14 points, six rebounds and four blocks, Lamb scored 14, and Teague and Terrence Jones each added 12.

In the end, Kentucky’s phalanx of playmakers was too much for the Tigers to withstand.

“I think we figured some things out tonight,” Barbee said. “Now can we take the next step? I am disappointed in the loss. The guys fought their tails off tonight. We have to take this and expound on it and go to the next level.”

Chris Denson supplemented Chubb’s night with 12 points, and role players Josh Wallace and Adrian Forbes played their roles well, with Wallace being a sparkplug on defense and Forbes bodying up the Wildcats’ bigs, grabbing five rebounds and taking two charges in 20 minutes.

They helped exhibit the tough, gritty style Barbee said his team played with regularly last year, the style he hopes will carry over from the Kentucky effort.

And he’s still looking for “catalysts” like Frankie Sullivan and Varez Ward — who finished with a combined 11 points on 3-of-13 shooting — to step up.

“When it matters, that’s when those catalysts perform,” Barbee said. “We haven’t quite figured out who that is going to be for us.”