Each March, the best teams in the Southeastern Conference descend upon Nashville, Tennessee, to participate in the SEC Men's Basketball Tournament. Since 2013, the tournament has been held almost every year at the Bridgestone Arena, which first opened in 1996 and seats 19,395 for basketball. The arena will continue to host the SEC Tournament through 2030, with the exception of 2022, when it is hosted at Tampa's Amalie Arena.

SEC Men's Basketball Tournament History

Since 1933, the Southeastern Conference has been one of the premiere conferences in all of college athletics. For the first two decades of its existence, the SEC held an annual conference tournament, with Adolph Rupp's Kentucky team winning it 13 times between 1933 and 1952. From 1951 until the late 1970s, round-robin play in the regular season determined the SEC champion, and it continues to be the official determiner of the conference title, with the tournament deciding an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament. The conference tournament resumed in 1979, with the Tennessee Volunteers defeating the defending national champion Kentucky Wildcats 75-69 in overtime at the championship game. The winner of the SEC Men's Basketball Tournament has gone on to win the NCAA championship five times, with Kentucky winning both events in 1948, 1959 and 1998, and Florida winning both in 2006 and 2007.

The 2008 tournament was notable for many reasons, including a tornado strike on the Georgia Dome as it hosted a quarterfinal game between Mississippi State and Alabama. While the game resumed within an hour, damage to the dome was extensive enough for the SEC to cancel the final game scheduled that evening, and move the rest of the tournament to the nearby Alexander Memorial Coliseum. Dennis Felton's Georgia team, who'd finished with a 4-12 conference mark that season, took advantage and went on to win. In 2019, Auburn beat Tennessee 84-63 in the finals, on their way to their first men's Final Four appearance.