BATON ROUGE — LSU is winning the battle for NCAA Tournament survival in Baton Rouge.

Tommy White went 3-for-4 with a solo home run, two doubles and two runs scored as LSU beat Ole Miss 4-2 on Friday to win their Southeastern Conference baseball series at Alex Box Stadium.

LSU (35-20, 12-17 SEC) also won the opener on Thursday night, 5-1, in a match-up of the last two national champions who are fighting to make this year’s NCAA Tournament.

Both teams have qualified for next week’s SEC Tournament in Hoover, Alabama, and likely need to win it to get to the NCAA Tournament. LSU might have helped its cause the past couple of days, however.

Ole Miss (27-26, 11-18) entered the weekend projected as one of the last four teams into the 64-team field, while LSU was projected to miss the cut. LSU won its fourth SEC series in the past five weekends.

White hit a solo home run in the first inning Friday, and then doubled and scored on Josh Pearson’s single in the fifth. The Tigers also got an RBI single by Alex Milazzo in the second inning and an RBI groundout by Hayden Travinski in the fifth to build a 4-0 lead.

White had multiple hits for the fifth consecutive game. He is 11-for-21 (.524) and has driven in seven runs in that span.
Luke Holman allowed two runs and struck out nine batters in 6 2/3 innings for LSU. He did not walk a batter and scattered five hits.

Both of Ole Miss’ runs came on a home run by Luke Hill in the sixth inning, which cut its deficit to 4-2. The Rebels also put their first two runners on base in the eighth before Griffin Herring came out of the bullpen to put out the fire.

Herring struck out the first two batters and got out of the jam with a ground out. He then retired the side in order in the ninth to complete a perfect two-inning outing. Herring earned his sixth save of the season.

Ole Miss’ Liam Doyle (3-3) allowed four runs in four innings and took the loss.

The final game of the series — and the regular season — is Saturday at 1 p.m. The SEC Tournament begins with a round of single-elimination games on Tuesday.

First-round match-ups for the SEC Tournament will be set after Saturday’s games.