AUBURN, Ala. — NCAA basketball tournament selection committee members usually favor teams that catch fire late in the season — not those limping down the stretch.No need to tell LSU coach Trent Johnson that.But Johnson didn’t seem concerned Saturday after the Tigers’ second-straight loss leading into the Southeastern Conference tournament.”We’ve been getting everybody’s best shot, but we’ve always looked at it and concerned ourselves with ourselves going into games,” Johnson said after his team’s 69-53 loss at Auburn. “We’re concerned with competing at a high level, and I think you saw that tonight.”Auburn held LSU to a season-low 53 points, and LSU shot only 34 percent from the field in last week’s losses to Auburn and Vanderbilt. The team entered the Vanderbilt game Wednesday shooting 46 percent on the season, including a slightly higher percentage against SEC opponents — just less than 47 percent — than  non-conference opponents.”It would be nice if the ball would have gone down,” Johnson said. “This is the second game in a row — home and on the road — where we had some guys that had some open looks. The ball didn’t go down.”The Tiger defense has also struggled down the homestretch, allowing an average of more than 72 points per game in their final five regular season contests.With the exception of a double-overtime victory at Mississippi State, LSU had allowed an average of 65 points per game in SEC play before the recent five-game stretch.”What’s going on defensively is our rotations aren’t as crisp, our sense of urgency isn’t as crisp as it’s been,” Johnson said. “But that has a lot to do with me as opposed to them … Obviously I need to do a better job of practice settings getting them more crisp on the defensive end.”LSU’s season-low performance Saturday closed with Auburn fans chanting “over-rated” at the LSU players.”I don’t think we were too much worried about that,” said LSU senior guard Marcus Thornton. “We won the SEC … The players in our locker room fought hard this season, and they got it.”Johnson credited Vanderbilt and Auburn for the Tigers’ struggles more than his own team’s shortcomings.”We’ve got the league wrapped up, but don’t tell me we didn’t compete versus Vanderbilt,” he said.  “We competed. We battled this afternoon. The ball didn’t go down for us.”Much of the postgame talk Saturday centered on whether Auburn, winner of eight of its last nine games, deserved an NCAA tournament berth.Both Johnson and Auburn coach Jeff Lebo said saying a hot Auburn team with 10 conference wins had no shot at a berth was a slap in the faces of Auburn and the entire SEC.”They kill the SEC. They kill the SEC West in particular,” Lebo said. “The SEC West was .500 [against the East] last I checked … I don’t know how they could say the West is a lot worse than the East … I don’t know anybody in any of the BCS leagues that have won eight of nine — maybe there are one or two.”ESPN’s latest editions of Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology and Mark Schlabach’s Bubble Watch listed LSU and Tennessee as the SEC’s only locks for the NCAA tournament.Lunardi listed South Carolina as the conference’s only other tourney team as one of the last four teams making the Big Dance.The SEC’s three teams are the least projected to make the NCAA tournament among the BCS conferences.——Contact Jerit Roser at [email protected]