TO THE HOOP — WVU forward Chance Moore drives to the basket against Kansas State on Tuesday. - Benjamin Powell

MORGANTOWN — As it turned out Tuesday night, Treysen Eaglestaff’s best play was a missed lay-up.

There were plenty of them to go around, as West Virginia held off a struggling Kansas State to improve to 13-0 at home following a 59-54 victory inside Hope Coliseum.

This particular miss, though, came right back to Eaglestaff with 43 seconds remaining and the 6-foot-6 guard put it right back in the hoop, got fouled and sealed the game with the free throw.

“When I first got here, I would just kind of float stuff at the rim,” said Eaglestaff, who finished with 12 points and nine rebounds. “I got a wake-up from coach (Ross) Hodge and coach (Phil) Forte about not doing that; to go at a guy’s chin and be a man. That was kind of my initial thought was to go through the guy’s chin.”

Eaglestaff did just that, but like so many shots on this night, both teams had to go with Plan B.

“It was like I told our guys, ‘Sometimes we’re going to have to do things the hard way,’ ” was how Hodge put it.

“This game was not for the faint of heart, especially when you came up on the short end of the scoreboard,” was Kansas State coach Jerome Tang’s take.

Neither team shot better than 41.8% from the field. WVU held a 10-point lead with 15:06 remaining in the game and then went through a long scoring drought that allowed the Wildcats to take a 49-45 lead 11 minutes later.

It wasn’t exactly the greatest start in the world for the Mountaineers, who erased a three-game losing streak against the Wildcats. It took nearly six minutes before WVU (14-7, 5-3 Big 12) scored its first point of the game — and that came on a cherry-picking lay-up from Chance Moore — and the Mountaineers’ first nine possessions produced five missed shots and four turnovers.

“We were struggling, but then you look up at the scoreboard and it’s only 8-2,” Hodge said. “The game itself was a grind. They sort of flipped our game back at us. They made it hard and we made just enough plays down the stretch to win a Big 12 game.”

Not that Kansas State (10-11, 1-7) was all that much better. P.J. Haggerty, who entered the game as the fifth-leading scorer in the country averaging 23.4 points per game, missed his first seven shots and was charged with two turnovers over the first 20 minutes of action.

He finished with 16 points on 6 of 19 from the field, but took an awkward 3-point attempt in the final seconds with the intent of trying to draw a foul rather than simply making the shot.

WVU led at the time, 57-54, and Haggerty was the victim of some tough no-calls down the stretch that could have easily gone in Kansas State’s favor.

“My message to him after the game was he’s got to go make the shot and let the refs make the calls,” Tang said. “He was probably a little frustrated, but he’s got to take a good shot and not look to draw a foul.”

Honor Huff grabbed the rebound, was fouled, and finished the game off with two free throws.

By the time WVU grabbed the momentum in this one, K-State was being held to just 33% shooting and Huff began heating up.

First came one from about 33 feet away, somewhere around the WVU Medicine logo on the floor.

Then came one off his back foot in the corner right in front of the expensive floor seats. That one tied the game at 16 with 5:22 left in the first half.

He topped it off with a no-look assist to Harlan Obioha and two more 3-pointers. Not a bad first half for a guy who had shot all of 34% from the floor over his past five games.

The second half was slightly different.

Huff impacted the game through passing (five assists) and rebounding (eight boards), but still finished with 17 points to lead the Mountaineers, who will now get set to host Baylor at 4 p.m. Saturday.

WVU impacted the game through it’s offensive rebounding in the second half. The Mountaineers grabbed 10 of them in all, setting up 15 second-chance points.

“They out-executed us and out-toughed us down the stretch,” Tang said. “They won the game with their offensive rebounding. The one by (Eaglestaff), boy, he didn’t quit playing. What they did at the end of the game was the difference.”