Before the Michigan basketball team played Wisconsin last week, the Wolverines sat down, as they always do, to watch film. Part of what the coaching staff showed the players that day doubled as a horror picture and comedy.

When the Wolverines saw themselves against Wisconsin in Madison on Jan. 5, they cringed at the number of mistakes they made and how they looked playing basketball.

“We looked like a completely different team,” junior guard Stu Douglass said. “It was laughable a little bit with some of the bad plays we made.”

In many ways, Michigan is a different team. The Wolverines were about to start a six-game losing streak when they lost at Wisconsin, one leaving Michigan lost and confused as it traveled to East Lansing on Jan. 27 to play Michigan State.

What happened next altered the Wolverines’ season.

While some of Michigan’s players and coaches were reluctant to pinpoint the Wolverines’ turnaround this season to one game, the results say differently.

Including Michigan’s 61-57 win over Michigan State, the Wolverines have won 7 of their last 10 games entering Saturday’s rematch with the Spartans (2 p.m., CBS).

That streak led to both Michigan and Michigan State being on the NCAA tournament bubble Saturday, with a decent chance that the game's winner will reach the 68-team field and the loser will be heading to the NIT.

“We were down,” junior guard Zack Novak said. “Going into that week, my message to the guys was ‘Listen, we’re 1-6 but if we win this game, everybody is right back behind us.’

“And it was the perfect time to have that game. We went in there and got the win and
that’s what we needed to do. We’ve fixed a lot since then.”

The turnaround has been complete.

The Wolverines have turned a defense that was among the worst in conference play in Division I and made it respectable, allowing two teams in the stretch to score over 1.1 points per possession. Michigan had let every Big Ten team score over 1.1 points a possession in its first seven Big Ten games

The Wolverines also started believing in themselves, their offense and their roles in it. They listened to what Michigan coach John Beilein was saying and it all started to meld together.

“People just really know their roles much better than they did at that time,” Beilein said. “We were all searching how to win at this level with such a young team.”

They found it.

It helped, too, that Michigan started receiving consistent production from almost its entire lineup. Freshman guard Tim Hardaway Jr., who has been making a late push to be a freshman All-American, has scored in double figures in every game during the 10-game stretch, including a season-high 30 at Iowa.

Darius Morris returned to his efficient scoring from earlier in the season, scoring in double-figures in all but one game (8 against Wisconsin) and became an indispensible floor leader. Jordan Morgan figured out how to stay out of foul trouble and in the lineup, which has led to double-digit scoring in three of the last four games.

Much of that can be traced back to Michigan State.

“You could tell people was getting a little bit down,” Morris said. “Just natural human instinct after you lose six straight, to get down a little bit.

“But after that Michigan State win, it boosted our confidence and carried over to other games.”

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein