Chance after chance was eluding Mizzou.

But Jedier Hernandez didn’t miss his.

The MU catcher drove home Jackson Lovich in the 11th inning, and Missouri baseball stunned No. 6 Florida 2-1 on Friday evening at Taylor Stadium for an extra-innings win in the series opener.

The Tigers were in control for most of the game behind a one-hit start from Logan Lunceford but couldn’t close the game in regulation due to a wasteful performance from the Missouri offense.

Leadoff hitter Jeric Curtis made it home after opening the game with a triple. After that, the next 15 Missouri players that reached base were left there.

That streak ended in the 11th inning, when Lovich hustled for a double, narrowly beating out the throw at second and surviving a Florida challenge on the call. Mizzou (13-18, 2-9 SEC) put another player on base when Kaden Peer was hit by a pitch.

But instead of adding two more to the left-on-base tally, Hernandez dealt the crucial blow to the Gators (17-12, 6-4).

“Honestly, relief,” Hernandez said. “We all needed it, man. We’ve been struggling on the hitting side. Not the pitching side. You see we’ve got dogs, … they've been doing their job, and we've been struggling all year hitting. So, like, honestly we've been fighting all day, too. It was tough game from the beginning to the end, and hopefully we can just keep going, keep rolling off this one.”

Here’s how the action unfolded as Kerrick Jackson earned his first signature as Missouri’s coach:

Missouri baseball starter Lunceford tosses gem

Logan Lunceford, have yourself a day.

In his eighth start of the season, Lunceford gave up one hit, one walk and struck out eight while shutting out the Gators in six innings of work.

After retiring Florida’s front-loaded lineup in order in the first, the Gators started sending out warning shots.

Colby Shelton hit a line drive to right field that MU right fielder Jackson Beaman had to sprint to hunt down on the warning track and end the third inning. Designated hitter Luke Heyman drilled one in the opposite direction, but MU third baseman Trevor Austin stopped it in its tracks with an extended glove.

But Lunceford kept sending the Gators back to the dugout with nothing.

And then he started sending them back with haste.

He retired Florida’s batters in order in both the fifth and sixth innings before Carter Rustad came on in relief. UF managed just two hits in regulation.

Rustad retired the Gators in order in three of his five innings of work, finishing with a line of one hit, one earned run and five strikeouts.

"I mean, both those guys pitched really, really well," Jackson said. "They gave us gave us an opportunity and we played good defense. Obviously we had our struggles from an offensive standpoint, but they kept us in there."

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Missouri offense wasteful despite win

Missouri’s first batter made it back home. Jeric Curtis led the Tigers off with a triple. Beaman almost immediately drove him home.

And then things got bleak.

Missouri was 1 of 16 from scoring position before Hernandez’s heroics.

Five Tigers were walked. The MU lineup racked up eight hits.

But even as MU’s pitching duo kept the Gators silent, the Tigers struggled to put the visitors away.

By the time the fifth inning was over, Missouri had left double-digit runners on base. The Tigers loaded the bases in both the second and fourth innings, with one and two outs, respectively, but couldn’t get anyone back across.

That briefly caught up to Missouri, as UF third baseman Dale Thomas hit a no-doubter over the left-field wall off of Rustad to tie the game at 1 in the eighth inning.

This time, MU escaped. That likely won’t be the case against two-way star Jac Caglianone and the Gators later this weekend.

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What does this win mean for Missouri?

Wins have been hard to come by for the Tigers since conference play opened, with a win over unranked Kentucky on March 23 the lone chalk in the column.

In Game 10, the Tigers found No. 2.

Missouri nearly leaped off the floor of the SEC with the win, but Auburn, which also entered Friday with a 1-8 conference record, beat Tennessee later in the day.

If Missouri’s hopes of reaching the 12-team SEC Tournament seemed slim, the door is now ajar. Two teams, LSU and Ole Miss, have three conference wins following Friday losses. Two more teams, Alabama and Georgia, have four wins.

To reach the postseason, Mizzou must find a way to finish ahead of two teams in the league. They're now just a game back of that mark.

"We came into this, you're looking at 20, 21 games left in the conference," Jackson said. "So there's a lot of things that can still be done, and we've been kind of going there and then we'll take a couple steps back, so hopefully we continue to move forward here."

Jackson delivered his first signature win during his time in Columbia.

That's not how the head coach is looking at Friday's result, however, as he turned his focus to the bigger picture.

"I mean, at the end of the day, we're trying to develop the right culture, right?" Jackson said. "And so when we talk about signature wins or big wins, those are conference championships, regionals, those types of things. This is a win in a game in the process of developing a program that is going to be successful for a long time.

"So we'll look back on this and talk about how this helped us get to that point, but in the grand scheme of things, it's another game that we played well, there's mistakes that we made that we need to capitalize and fix. But, we've got more to do. We didn't come into the season with the idea of, 'hey, let's get a win against Florida,' right? It was come in, play quality baseball and make some things happen."

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Missouri baseball stuns No. 6 Florida in extra innings