The Night UNLV Got a Headache : College basketball: A raucous UC Santa Barbara gym last February was the scene of Rebels’ last loss.

On the Monday night almost a year ago, when Nevada Las Vegas last lost a basketball game, the “thunder meter” in UC Santa Barbara’s Campus Events Center rose to a decibel level of 105, which is equivalent to the noise made by a jet plane.

Bill Mahoney, Santa Barbara’s sports information director, still gets a headache when he thinks about the morning after that game.

“My ears felt the same as they did after an AC/DC heavy metal concert when I was an usher at the Long Beach Arena,” he said.

The painful din apparently was too much for the Rebels, especially for guard Anderson Hunt, who made only two of 13 shots from three-point range as Santa Barbara pulled a 78-70 upset.

“That’s the noisiest place we ever played in, even noisier than Arkansas was,” UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian recalled Monday, the day after the No. 1-ranked Rebels had beaten the then-No. 2 Razorbacks, 112-105.

Since losing to Santa Barbara, the Rebels have won 31 consecutive games, including one for the NCAA title, and are generating debate as to whether they are the greatest college team of all time.

They were only slightly less overwhelming when they came to Santa Barbara Feb. 26, 1990, with a 24-4 record, a 10-game winning streak and a No. 2 ranking behind Oklahoma. And their starting lineup was the same as now, except that David Butler, not George Ackles, was the center.

But with an 18-7 record, the Gauchos were far from hopeless underdogs.

The Events Center seats 6,100 but was jammed with 6,387 fans. The UCSB students had had until 9 p.m. to get primed for the nationally televised game.

After trailing, 21-19, with about nine minutes to play in the first half, the Gauchos took the lead and never relinquished it.

“We looked them in the eye and showed no fear,” guard Carrick DeHart told the Santa Barbara News-Press after scoring 24 points despite a sprained ankle.

With the help of the crowd, the Gauchos never let Las Vegas go on one of its famous runs, the kind that turned around the game Sunday against Arkansas.

“David Butler was mocking the crowd and doing all this screaming,” forward Eric McArthur said. “I think that made the crowd a little more determined to be aggressive.”

McArthur had 15 points, 20 rebounds and four blocked shots.

Forward Gary Gray held Rebel star Larry Johnson to 10 points and five rebounds as the Gauchos finished with a 47-31 rebounding advantage against a team that has only been out-rebounded twice since.

“I thought Santa Barbara played a great game,” Tarkanian said. “They out-quicked us to the ball, but I thought our kids were just dead tired. We had played Louisville the Saturday before and were playing something like our 13th game in 30 days.”

So how did the Gauchos do it?

“We were the aggressor, and that was the difference,” Coach Jerry Pimm said.