The LSU soccer team needed just one half to dispatch Vanderbilt and advance in the Southeastern Conference tournament.The No. 16 Tigers (13-4-3) raced to a 3-1 halftime lead behind the efforts of senior midfielder Melissa Clarke and never looked back in a 4-2 drubbing of the Commodores (11-8-1).”We played really, really well,” said LSU coach Brian Lee. “We attacked well and finished the majority of our chances, and a lot of those chances happened to come early.”The team will rematch with Auburn at 5 p.m. on Friday in the semifinals. Auburn defeated Ole Miss, 2-1, on Wednesday afternoon, setting up a second meeting with LSU after the purple-and-gold Tigers pulled out a 2-0 win at Auburn on Oct. 4.”Ole Miss is a fantastic team, and Auburn had a comfortable 2-1 win against them,” Lee said. “They’re very disciplined and very well-coached.”Clarke provided the spark for an LSU team on a three-game SEC win streak. She tied senior midfielder Malorie Rutledge as the team’s leading goal scorer this season after just nine minutes of play when she slotted her ninth goal of the year into the net.Rutledge, fresh off her second SEC Offensive Player of the Year award, also earned her 12th assist of the season on that afternoon. She received X-rays for a head injury she sustained just before halftime, but Lee said they were negative, and she would be “good to go” on Friday.”We played Vanderbilt in the regular season and went to overtime, so it was a big goal of ours to get out early and keep them on their toes the whole game,” Rutledge said in a news release.Sophomore forward Kellie Murphy extended the lead to 2-0 in the 19th minute when she bounced a header off the crossbar and into the goal on a corner kick from junior defender Courtney Alexander.”[Murphy] is a bigger part of why the team has improved so much in the latter part of the season,” Lee said.The Commodores showed signs of life with a 28th-minute goal to cut the deficit to 2-1, but Clarke delivered a second strike — her team-leading 10th — just three minutes before halftime to keep the Tigers’ lead at two. Freshman forward Carlie Banks put the lead out of reach 13 minutes after halftime. Senior forward Rachel Yepez found Banks streaking on a breakaway, and the freshman scored her seventh goal of the season to extend LSU’s lead to 4-1.”When the team is playing well, [Banks] scores,” Lee said. “It’s no surprise that she got a goal today.”Vanderbilt junior forward Molly Kinsella gave her team a late consolation goal in the 86th minute, but it could not keep the Commodores from becoming the tournament’s first casualty.”I thought LSU came out prepared, and they did a good job of putting us under a tremendous amount of pressure early in the game,” Vanderbilt coach Ronnie Woodard said in a news release. “We had a difficult time getting out of an early 2-0 hole, and we had to chase the game to find it.” The Tigers’ win marks the third-consecutive year they have advanced to the tournament’s second round. Another win Friday would send them to the championship game, which will be televised on ESPNU at 2 p.m. Sunday.—-Contact David Helman at [email protected]