BATON ROUGE - LSU women’s basketball are seeded No. 13 in the upcoming SEC Tournament with their first game of the preseason challenge scheduled against No.12 seeded Alabama on Wednesday.

Tip-off will be at 10 a.m. at Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Fla.

“We’re going to look at this SEC Tournament as a new season for our team,” said LSU head coach Nikki Fargas. “The strength of the SEC is the best in the country when you look at the number of teams that we consistently get into NCAA Tournament play. But we know that we have a tough road ahead of us to get to the championship game and we’re going to focus on the first opponent we have, which is Alabama. Our game plan is to make sure that we control the controllables like how hard we play, how disciplined we are in our shot selection and how hard we play on the defensive end.”

LSU and Alabama have faced each other five times in previous SEC Tournaments. LSU is 3-2 in those contests. The two teams last met in the tournament back in 2014 when LSU beat the Crimson Tide by a score of 78-65 in the second round.

“I feel like we’re a different team than when we played Alabama (earlier this year),” said Fargas. “They did a nice job of getting out quickly when they had the transition game against us at their place. We were adjusting to our injuries, but now we’ve settled in and I know this team is capable of being a much better defensive team. We take pride in the fact that we’re one of the better rebounding teams that we’ve had here under my leadership, and we’re not allowing our opponents to score a lot of points. We have to take our defensive board play to another level in order to be able to come away with the win against Alabama.”

The Lady Tigers are 9-20 this season. The winner of the LSU-Alabama game will go on to play No. 5 seed Kentucky on Thursday.

LSU-Alabama will be broadcast on the SEC Network. The SEC Network telecast will also be available at www.WatchESPN.com and via the Watch ESPN app.