After the home loss to last-place Penn State on Saturday, Gophers men’s basketball head coach Ben Johnson treated Tuesday’s game at Williams Arena as if it were on the road. The U’s locker room was set up like the visiting space at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, and Johnson said he talked to his team as if it were going into hostile territory.

Minnesota couldn’t mix those strange ingredients together for some sort of home cooking, falling to Northwestern 75-63 at The Barn.

“Just to mentally take them to a different place,” Johnson said about his change in approach. “Just trying to get them to that. Because it’s not — these guys want it. That is my job, trying to pull them and help them through that stuck feeling.”

The Gophers (14-14, 6-11 Big Ten) lost to the Wildcats (15-13, 6-11) and gave up the ground they had between making the 15-team Big Ten Conference tournament field and being among three basement teams eliminated from the tourney in mid-March.

Johnson was grasping for ways to bring his team back to the sweep of UCLA and Southern California over a week ago because they have been a different team in Minneapolis. The U is 4-4 in conference road games but only 2-7 in Big Ten home games.

Minnesota will now be underdogs against Nebraska, Wisconsin and, likely, at Rutgers to end the regular season.

Northwestern is known as a heavy screening team, and Minnesota didn’t fight enough to go through and around the picks in the first half, allowing more good shot attempts. The Wildcats jumped out to a 10-0 lead and were able to immediately build on their 70-49 blowout of Ohio State on Thursday.

The second half started the same way. On the first defensive possession, Lu’Cye Patterson didn’t make it through two screens, giving Jordan Clayton space to knock down a 3-pointer.

Johnson said his players are reacting a half-step slow and are fighting a “paralyzed feeling.”

“You can feel every pass, and you can feel every cut. And every screen or missed screen or every shot a team makes, you feel that,” Johnson said. “Everyone feels that. It’s too hard to play like that. Even the most talented players, it’s a grind. That grind turns in the mental grind.”

The Wildcats’ best player, Nick Martinelli, extended his lead over Dawson Garcia in a battle (with others) for the Big Ten scoring title.

Martinelli, who was putting up 19.7 per contest, finished with 29 points. The junior forward had two 3-point plays to help keep the lead in the double digits midway though the second half.

Coming in at 19.4 points per game, Garcia put up 26 on 3 of 7 shooting behind the arc. His teammates were a combined 2 for 11 from deep.

With Martinelli leading the way with three 3-pointers, Northwestern made four more treys and shot 47% from deep compared to 26% for Minnesota.

The Wildcats have also overcome serious injuries, with two key players being lost to season-ending injuries in the past three weeks: second-leading scorer Brooks Barnhizer (knee) and third-leading scorer Jalen Leach (knee).

They will have the tiebreaker over Minnesota, if both are scratching to keep their postseason hopes alive.