SEC Men's Basketball Tournament

The SEC basketball tournament is the annual, single-elimination basketball tournament held each March after the conference's regular season. First held in 1933, the conference tournament was disbanded in the early 1950s before being renewed in 1979, and it has been held every year since. All 12 conference teams compete for the tournament title, which determines the SEC's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

Vanderbilt beat Kentucky in the title game in 2012, winning its first SEC tournament crown since 1951.

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) has been a 12-school league since the early 1990s, and each team participates in the annual single-elimination conference tournament to determine the conference's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. The tournament seeds are determined by the 16-game conference schedule during the regular season. Prior to 2012, the conference was split up into East and West divisions, and the first-round matchups were set up to pit teams from opposing divisions against each other. In 2012, the SEC abandoned the divisional format and seeded teams 1-12 for the conference tournament.

The inaugural Southeastern Conference (SEC) tournament was played in February 1933, and was the first championship event held by the newly established conference. Thirteen schools took part in that initial competition at the Atlanta Athletic Club, with the Kentucky Wildcats emerging as champions. Atlanta again played host the following season, when Alabama won the tournament trophy after defeating Florida in the final.

Afer a year without a tournament in 1935, the SEC moved its postseason conference competition to Alumni Hall in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1936. The hometown Volunteers of Tennessee captured the title that year, but were defeated by Kentucky in the 1937 final in an attempt for consecutive championships. Georgia Tech, which would leave the SEC years later to join the Metro Conference (and later the Atlantic Coast Conference), claimed its only SEC tournament trophy in 1938 at Huey Long Field House in Baton Rouge, La.

Kentucky returned to the top in 1939 by defeating Tennessee in the tournament final, and became the first school to repeat as SEC tournament champion with a win over Georgia in the 1939 championship game. The Wildcats continued to dominate in the 1940s; apart from Tennessee's wins in 1941 and 1943, Kentucky claimed every other SEC tournament title that decade (all played at Louisville Gardens in Louisville, Ky.) The stretch included the 1944 tournament, when only six schools participated because of World War II.

Vanderbilt ended Kentucky's run of seven straight SEC tournament titles in 1951 after topping the Wildcats 61-57 in that year's final. Kentucky rebounded to win the 1952 trophy -- by virtue of a one-point win over LSU in the championship game -- but that year's competition would mark an end of sorts for the SEC tournament, as conference officials disbanded the tournament. For the next 26 college basketball seasons, the SEC's champion was determined by regular-season records.

The conference tournament was reinstated for the 1978-79 SEC season, when Tennessee neeeded overtime to defeat Kentucky in the final at the Birmingham-Jefferson Coliseum in Birmingham, Ala. The Wildcats reached the final again in 1980 but were on the losing end for the second year in a row as LSU won a first-ever tournament title.

Birmingham would serve as the site for five of the first seven SEC tournaments after its revival, when a different school was crowned champion each year between 1979 and 1985 -- with Mississippi, Georgia and Auburn garnering their first trophies in the postseason competition. Kentucky then captured two of the next three editions, but had to later forfeit the 1988 title due to NCAA violations.

With South Carolina and Arkansas joing the SEC in the early 1990s, the conference standings and tournament were revised. The 12 member schools were split into East and West divisions, and the top two teams from each division began receiving byes in the first round of the single-elimination competition. After Alabama was the victor in three straight SEC tournaments, Kentucky then claimed four straight from 1992 to 1995, the first year that Atlanta's Georgia Dome hosted the event.

Kentucky would win three consecutive trophies from 1997 to 1999, before Arkansas became the first team to win the SEC tournament by playing all four days of the competition in 2000. Georgia accomplished the same feat in the 2008 tournament (following Florida's three straight titles), which was the sixth one scheduled at the Georgia Dome during that decade. But a tornado hit the Atlanta area the weekend of the event, which forced the stoppage of one of the quarterfinal games. Due to damage at the Georgia Dome, the final five games that year had to be moved to nearby Alexander Coliseum, where the Bulldogs upset Mississippi State and then Arkansas to capture the tournament crown.

Mississippi State also won four games in four days to win the 2009 SEC tournament, played for the first time in Tampa, Fla., before longtime conference power Kentucky won its record 27th conference tournament title in 2010, defeating Mississippi State 75-74 in overtime in the final. The Wildcats repeated as conference champions in 2011.