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COLUMBIA, Mo. — This isn’t a freediving competition, but the same question at the core of those aquatic quests for the depths hangs over Missouri men’s basketball: How deep will it go?

It’s not a new or shocking question — no, it’s the one that has been quite relevant to the Tigers and second-year head coach Dennis Gates ever since he assembled a roster of 15 players for whom there is a case for minutes. The underlying assumption has been that the depth would wear down to some degree as the season wore on, with injuries, some players outshining others, that sort of thing.

That has played out a little bit. Guard Kaleb Brown is out for the season, bringing the scholarship player pool down to 14. Guard Caleb Grill is hurt too, meaning there will be 13 available for the next month and change. Guard John Tonje hasn’t played since Nov. 22 for an unclear reason.

The 12 remaining players all saw action against No. 2 Kansas last weekend, and there’s not much reason to think that much will be different, from an availability standpoint, when Mizzou takes on Seton Hall on Sunday in Kansas City.

But with 10 games down and Southeastern Conference play lurking in the shadows of the new year — just three nonconference games away — the time for Gates’ experimentation is beginning to dwindle. It’s not to say that the rotation he trots out Jan. 6 against Georgia will lock anything in for the rest of the season, but those SEC opponents will be far less permissive when it comes to lineup combinations not working or needing time to work things out.

Those final nonconference games — against a Seton Hall bunch that’s loosely on par with MU so far, a tough test against No. 16 Illinois in the Braggin’ Rights game and a holiday home buy game against Central Arkansas — present some of the last chances for experimentation to remain a priority.

Any sort of lineup and rotation analysis starts with Mizzou’s core of point guards Sean East II and Nick Honor and forward Noah Carter. Gates described that trio of players, all in their second seasons in Columbia, as his starting lineup anchors.

They’ve been that through the start of the season. Of the 400 minutes the Tigers have played — that’s 10 games times 40 minutes — all three have been on the court at the same time for 168 minutes, according to CBB Analytics’ lineup tracking. Mizzou has only spent two minutes without any members of the experienced trio in the game, which shows just how much Gates leans on the anchors.

In the 168 minutes with East, Honor and Carter all playing, Missouri has outscored its opponents by eight points, a rather pedestrian number. Lineups with the entire trio have posted a net rating of +2.8, meaning they outscore opponents by 2.8 points per 100 possessions.

When Honor sits and East and Carter run the show, a scenario that has come about for 75 minutes, the Tigers have scored a whopping 55 more points than their opponents. Lineups that have Honor and East playing without Carter have scored three more points than opponents in 57 minutes, and combinations based around Honor and Carter and no East have been outscored by three points in 31 minutes.

Those numbers aren’t necessarily decisive ones, given that sample sizes are still small. And basketball is a five-player game, so two- and three-player combinations can only indicate so much.

The data pool is almost overwhelming when considering full five-player lineups. With the aforementioned 15 players, the math suggests that there are, well, a lot of ways that Gates could deploy clumps of five. He’s used 154 lineups through 10 games, according to CBB Analytics, though a swath of those combinations have been used for only a minute or two.

There are only 10 combinations of five players who have spent at least nine minutes and 13 possessions on the court together, which is still not a lot of time — this is across 10 games, remember — for players to gel.

The two most productive lineups both involve the use of one of Mizzou’s three 7-footers at center, but only one such look will be available for the next several games. Honor, East and Carter mixed with Grill and center Connor Vanover produced a 23-point advantage in 11 minutes together. East, Carter, freshman point guard Anthony Robinson II, guard Tamar Bates and freshman center Jordan Butler also outscored opponents by 23 points, and that group has played nine minutes together.

Both of those combinations have posted net ratings in the 100th percentile, according to CBB Analytics, putting them among the most effective in the country.

Gates seems to have found something with the new starting lineup that he rolled out against Pittsburgh three games ago: Placing East, Honor and Carter alongside Bates and bouncy forward Aidan Shaw. That group has played the most together of any five players, assembling 29 minutes of data. In that span, they’ve outscored opponents by 10 and accumulated a net rating of +20.6 per 100 possessions.

And as for what Mizzou’s head coach is looking for when he evaluates the lineups he’s tried through 10 games, he keeps the specifics close to his chest.

“We just want to continue to be ourselves,� Gates said.