STILLWATER — Trying to figure out the Big 12 Conference this season has been a lot like trying to learn Spanish with a Japanese dictionary.

Nothing makes sense.

Wednesday night, Oklahoma limped up to Gallagher-Iba Arena without its best player — freshman forward Blake Griffin — to face an Oklahoma State team that had won five straight and was regarded as the hottest team in the conference.

So it made perfect sense for the Sooners to muscle their way to a 68-56 victory.

“People are always going to doubt us if we have injuries or are playing down a little bit,” center Longar Longar said after scoring 12 points.

There was little reason not to. OU (20-10, 8-7 Big 12) was coming off a 64-37 victory over Texas A&M, but that win had stopped a two-game losing streak and the Sooners’ two wins before that had come on last-second 3-pointers.

They’d scored a combined 90 points in lopsided losses at Texas and Nebraska in their last two road games.

But none of those factors seemed to matter Wednesday night.

The only thing that did was OU continuing to play tenacious defense and guard Tony Crocker getting so hot he had an orange glow.

The sophomore guard scored a career-high 25 points and pretty much dominated the game for the final 30 minutes.

“I really felt like he was going to have a good game,” OU coach Jeff Capel said. “I could tell how excited he was, but he had a focus. Once he got going we wanted to keep going to him.”

Crocker, who was 8-for-13 from the field and 5-for-5 from the 3-point range, hit a pair of treys in the final 70 seconds of the first half to help OU take a 32-30 halftime lead.

When OU opened the second half with a 7-0 run, it was pretty much their game to win.

“Those shots were real big going into the half,” Crocker said. “We got on a solid run, as coach would say.”

Oklahoma State (16-13, 7-8) was playing its biggest game of the season and it was senior night to boot. It basically needed to win out in the regular season to have any chance of getting an at-large berth to the NCAA Tournament.