EAST LANSING, Mich. — N.C. State’s defense was nowhere to be found Wednesday night in the Breslin Center, and Michigan State reaped the benefits in an 81-58 victory.

Maybe the Wolfpack’s players were intimidated. Maybe they were tired, playing their fourth game in seven days. But whatever it was, the team showed it has plenty of work to do on the defensive end.

“The crowd was a big factor, and they just ran what they ran,” freshman center J.J. Hickson said. “We didn’t get them out of their element early, just let them do what they wanted to do, and they kept going in their own house.”

Such was the case as State allowed Goran Suton, who averaged nine points per contest coming into the game, to score the first eight points for the Spartans, almost all on open baskets down low. Not even 15 minutes into the game, it was 29-9 MSU as the Pack looked lost.

Coach Sidney Lowe saw his team lose any chance of securing a win in the early going due to a porous defense that made any MSU player willing to pull the trigger look like a star. But he said his players deviated from his defensive plan by trying to “shoot the gap” through screens.

“That wasn’t the game plan,” Lowe said. “We were supposed to chase those guys over.”

MSU shot 52.2 percent on field goals, but that wasn’t hard to do. Even when it wasn’t an opening down low, it was a great shot from the perimeter with no defenders in the vicinity.

The good news is the opposition Wednesday was no small foe, a team that took No. 2 UCLA to the wire eight days earlier. There’s still plenty of time for the team to improve its defense, and this type of game could serve as motivation.

But a factor Lowe hinted at — energy — is something the Pack has to show more of all the time.

“They won the hustle war. They won the physical war tonight,” Lowe said. “We weren’t able to match that.”

Even when the Pack went on an 11-0 run to pull to a 71-51 deficit, the Spartans responded with an open jumper by Drew Neitzel and an open dunk by Raymar Morgan within the next 35 seconds. It was emblematic of the night.

“They just kept pushing the rock down our throat,” Hickson said. “We didn’t get back fast enough.”

Early in the season, that’s the story of a team with plenty of great offensive players: Faster and better defense is a must.