BATON ROUGE - The LSU Tiger baseball team belted out 18 hits and scored 17 runs in their dominating win over Southern on Wednesday night at Alex Box Stadium.

Tiger right-fielder Antoine Duplantis led the charge with a 4 for 5 night and 5 RBI as LSU scored eight runs in the first inning on the way to their 17-4 victory.

The top-ranked Tigers scored 16 runs in the first five innings and all but one starting player recorded a hit in the game.

“I am really proud of our guys,” head coach Paul Mainieri said. “I was a little nervous about what kind of focus there would be tonight. We were all geared up to play South Alabama yesterday, and then, that didn’t happen. Then of course, we have a big series we are leaving for tomorrow in Austin. I was a little bit afraid we might not come out here today and have the focus and attention to detail. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We came out here and I thought we played really well right from the start. We had a lot of big hits, everybody threw the ball great on the mound, and we played flawless defensively. It was a good game for us. I told our guys they can enjoy it for about 10 minutes and then it is time to forget about it and get ready to go for a big series this weekend.”

LSU will travel to Austin for a three game series against the Texas Longhorns starting on Friday evening.