Michigan State played their last non-conference game on the next to last day of 2023 as they hosted the Indiana State Sycamores of the Missouri Valley Conference and their 11-1 record. A lot of the talk coming into this game was about the Sycamores being a Quad 1 opponent that the Spartans needed to take seriously, and that turned out to be the case.
Of course, a matchup of these two schools cannot take place without a reminder that it is a rematch of the 1979 NCAA Championship game which featured Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and gave MSU its first national championship.