In one sense, Ole Miss didn’t accomplish a whole lot in its final game of the regular season.

The 3-2 win over Texas A&M on Saturday still led to the Rebels getting the No. 7 seed in the Southeastern Conference Tournament — the lowest they could have gotten in the various scenarios in front of them — and it even handed the regular-season championship to hated rival Mississippi State.

In another sense, though, it was one of the biggest wins of the season.

The Rebels snapped a three-game losing streak by beating the Aggies and got a needed shot of confidence and momentum heading into Hoover. They’ll open the SEC Tournament with a single-elimination game Tuesday against No. 10 seed Georgia feeling a lot better than they would have if they’d been swept, coach Mike Bianco said.

“We’d also lost in the midweek, and that made three in a row losing the first two. Losing four in a row would have put a damper on a lot of things,” Bianco said. “A&M is so good, and it was a tremendous atmosphere with them competing for their first championship, that winning helped us a lot. Hopefully we grew up a little more on that Saturday afternoon.”

The Ole Miss-Georgia game at 1 p.m. is one of four single-elimination games on tap in today’s opening round. Vanderbilt and Missouri got the ball rolling with a 9 a.m. start. Kentucky and Alabama will play at 4:30 p.m., and LSU and Tennessee are in the late game at 8.

SEC coaches always talk about the league’s parity, but it seems to be on another level this season. Six teams, including Ole Miss (40-16), entered the final weekend of the regular season with a chance to earn the No. 1 seed that wound up going to Mississippi State.

The SEC Tournament, with its one-and-done opening round and the way teams have to reconfigure their pitching staffs on short rest, always has a different feel than the regular season, Bianco said. The heightened level of competition in the league this year could amp up the randomness even more.

“That’s what makes this conference so good. It doesn’t have up and down years. I will say that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a year where there were so many really good teams. Not just teams that were going to play in a regional or host regionals,” Bianco said. “They’ve never had more than four teams with 18 wins (in SEC play) and this year we have seven. We have six teams in the league with 40 wins in 56 regular-season games. When you look at the RPI and ranking and all of those things, I think it’s going to be a tremendous field there this week.”

Ole Miss took two out of three games from Georgia (27-29) when the teams played in Athens earlier this month. Ole Miss won the first two before Georgia cruised to a 13-2 win in the finale.

Georgia coach Scott Stricklin said he came away from that series impressed by the Rebels, and their bullpen in particular. In Ole Miss’ two wins, its relievers combined to throw 8 2/3 innings of shutout ball while allowing three hits and four walks.

“I thought their bullpen arms were really good all weekend long,” Stricklin said. “(Brady) Bramlett came out of the game early on Friday, and they did a really good job coming out of the bullpen with (Andy) Pagnozzi and (Brady) Feigl.”

Georgia is coming into the tournament on a monthlong slump. Since winning a series against East Division champion South Carolina in mid-April, it has gone 7-12 and lost four of its last five conference series.

The skid has put the Bulldogs on the bubble for the NCAA Tournament. They’ll likely need a deep run in Hoover, and possibly to win the whole thing, to keep the season going beyond this week.

The key to surviving beyond Tuesday, Stricklin said, is to literally get a good start.

“It comes down to your starting pitching, especially in a long tournament like this,” Stricklin said. “You have to have a great start to keep your bullpen fresh and then move to the next day. It’s a grind. It’s a challenge for everybody. But at the end of the day, it’s the team with the deepest pitching and the starters that can go the deepest in the game that’s going to give you a chance to win.”