After an exceptionally rough outing last week against Vanderbilt, LSU baseball pitcher Casan Evans rebounded for his finest start of the season and propelled the Tigers to victory on Thursday.

LSU defeated No. 7 Oklahoma 7-1 on Thursday. Behind a hot offensive start, Evans dominated the Oklahoma lineup, posting highs for strikeouts for both his career and the LSU pitching staff in 2026.

The offense for LSU got to work immediately, posting a run on four walks off of Oklahoma starter and former LSU pitcher Cam Johnson in the first inning.

Patience was the key in the early going. The first six LSU batters worked their counts up to three balls, pushing Johnson’s pitch count to 38 by the inning’s end.

That workload paid dividends in the next LSU frame. The Tigers would tack on four more runs in the second, with two of those marks coming from runners who reached on walks. They were also the beneficiary of three critical Oklahoma errors that allowed three runs to score.

LSU’s lone hit of the inning, a John Pearson single, was its first of the night and pushed the lead to five.

From there, it was Evans’s show.

“Like Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl,” head coach Jay Johnson said about Evans’ showing. “I remember being 11 years old and handing the ball to Bo Jackson, when you got a pitcher executing like that.”

He struck out three Oklahoma batters to get the game underway, setting the tone for an evening where the sophomore would pile up strikeouts.

“I was able to tell within the first few batters that it was going to be a good game for me,” Evans said.

He retired the Sooners’ side in order in the second, a feat he’d replicate twice more in the fourth and fifth innings.

In that fourth inning, he collected another trio of strikeouts against the heart of the Oklahoma lineup. He set down the reigning SEC Player of the Week, Brock, looking. Then he fanned Jaxson Willits, a top draft prospect and brother of Eli, the first overall pick in the 2025 MLB Draft. Lastly, he struck out LaChance, Oklahoma’s leader in batting average.

He’d strike out the two batters in the fifth inning to make it five straight Oklahoma batters retired by strikeout and move his total on the night to 10.

Between the sixth and seventh innings, he strung together another streak of three consecutive strikeouts to earn his career-high in punchouts at 13.

“I felt like [the count] was 0-2 to everybody,” Johnson said. “I don’t know how you get on a guy like that when they’re landing four pitches for strikes.”

That count wouldn’t stop there, though. He struck out the first two batters in the eighth to get the count to 15, where it would close at. Fifteen strikeouts are a single-game high for an LSU pitcher in 2026.

The last time any Tiger hit that mark was March 8, 2025, when Anthony Eyanson fanned 15 North Alabama batters.

The dazzling performance was simply a reflection of the skill that the LSU ace holds.

“He’s one of the best pitchers in the country and growing,” Johnson said. “We haven’t lost very much when he takes the mound.

For Evans, he was just having fun.

“Went out there today, told myself to have fun and go play the game that I love,” Evans said.

As excellent as his ability to generate strikeouts was, Evans was also incredibly efficient at getting through innings and limiting traffic, something that sunk him in his losing effort at Vanderbilt.

He let no more than one Sooner reach base in any given inning, and gave up just one run, unearned, after a throwing error from first baseman Zach Yorke let Walk storm home from second base in the sixth inning.

Critically, he gave up just one walk, coming on a full count to his last batter of the evening with two outs in the eighth. That is a stat for sore eyes after he gave five Vanderbilt batters the free pass over three innings in Nashville last Friday.

“I’m very happy with my performance this week,” Evans said about his bounce back. “Carry some things from this weekend to next week, and hopefully do the same thing again.”

Ethan Plog and Zac Cowan combined to get the last four outs and put the stamp on the LSU win.

The Tigers will look to secure their first SEC series win of the year tomorrow. They’ll face off against Oklahoma again on Friday at 6:30 p.m., the second of three games against the Sooners.