Michigan men’s basketball sophomore guard Darius Morris seems to have totally forgotten about the Wolverines' buzzer-beater loss to Ohio State in the Big Ten tournament last season.

When asked if last year’s 69-68 season-ending defeat to the then fifth-ranked Buckeyes motivated any sort of revenge for Wednesday’s rematch against Ohio State at Crisler Arena, Morris was nonchalant.

“Oh, honestly the thing that I thought about when you said (that was when) we had Ohio State at home," Morris said on Tuesday afternoon. "I just really went back to when we had Ohio State here at home and had a victory, just positive thoughts. Really that’s the only thing that I thought about. Now that you brought it up, I think about it.”

The last time that the Buckeyes came to Ann Arbor, Michigan pulled off a 73-64 upset, though Ohio State captain and last season’s National Player of the Year Evan Turner was out of the game because of injury.

The Buckeyes are led by a different national star this year in freshman forward Jared Sullinger. The 280-pound rookie has claimed eight of the nine Big Ten Freshman of the Week awards this season — the one being claimed by teammate Deshaun Thomas.

Leading the conference in defensive rebounds and second in offensive rebounding, Sullinger tallies a team-high 18 points per game. Michigan dealt with Kansas’s Markieff and Marcus Morris in the post on Sunday by showing different looks on defense and sometimes double-teaming them in the paint. That type of team mentality will be necessary to stop Sullinger as well.

“We’ve played some good post players already,” redshirt freshman forward Jordan Morgan said. “We need to approach it the same way, as a team. Not just one-on-one matchups. We just have to shift our whole defense towards some of their better players.”

The Wolverines intend to alternate between 1-3-1 zone and man-to-man defensive schemes throughout the game. By dealing out different looks on defense, Michigan coach John Beilein plans to limit what the Buckeyes can do with their size advantage.

“Whatever (defense) is getting stops, works,” junior guard Zack Novak said. “I think mixing it up is good because it doesn’t let teams get into rhythm. I know that when teams mix it up against us, I guess it just messes with you a little bit. You can’t really get into (a) flow mentally.”

But slowing down Ohio State’s post game isn’t the Wolverines' only concern. The Buckeyes boast some of the best perimeter play in the conference. Senior guards Jon Diebler and David Lighty are shooting a combined 49 percent from 3-point range.

“Lighty has improved every year because he is an athlete," Beilein said. "He is a football player, a two sport athlete. He is physical, he gets to the basket. They’ll isolate him a lot on our guys and just try to get him to the foul line. And when you coach against a kid for four years, you just see that 3-pointer climb … He had a huge one against Minnesota (on Sunday). He can do so many different things.”

Though there are new players on the rise for the Buckeyes, they are a similar team to the one the Wolverines contested three times last year. Michigan’s experience in previous games with Ohio State will serve as a blueprint for what needs to be done on Wednesday.

“If you look at them last year we played them in six halves,” Beilein said. “I think we won four of the six halves but we lost two of the three games. So we need to make sure that we put two halves together … We have to keep it consistent so that we have a chance to win. We can’t continue to get these double digit deficits and come back to win, it’s really hard.”