Mike Anderson knows how big this stretch of four games to finish the season is.

“The games just keep getting bigger,” he said Monday at his pre-Kentucky press conference.

Kentucky’s coming to Bud Walton on Tuesday night — not ranked, which is always strange to even type — but Anderson knows it’s always a big game.

Whenever the Razorbacks and Wildcats meet, well, it’s a game that energizes the fans and usually the players. The guess here is Mike also gets a little pumped over it.

“It should be a great atmosphere,” he said. “I love this time of the year. This is a time when all of the things start coming together.”

The Hogs are riding a four-game winning streak, including knocking off Texas A&M on Saturday night by 19 points.

“These guys are starting to have fun,” Anderson said. “We’ve been playing really efficient basketball. We had 17 assists and shot nearly 50 percent against A&M.”

But it IS Kentucky, a team Arkansas has struggled with in recent years.

“This is the next game on our schedule,” Anderson said, trying to downplay it like most coaches do. “It’s whoever happens to be on the schedule at this point in time. We played them at their place and in the tournament last year and they beat us. That’s the bottom line.”

The Razorbacks come into the game as the hottest 3-point team in the SEC. The Wildcats are the best in the league defending that.

“Something has to give,” Anderson said with a smile.

This is usually the time when Anderson’s teams seem to get on a roll. They’ll drop a game here or there along the way, which happens these days in college basketball, especially in a year when the SEC is good, but is very balanced.

In reality, the Hogs are probably already locked into the NCAA Tournament, regardless of what they do the rest of the way.

It’s a battle for seeding right now and a couple of wins through the rest of the schedule (including the SEC Tournament) could get them as high as a No. 9, according to most of the guys who project such things.

As usual, Kentucky is a team dominated by freshmen, but it’s one of these John Calipari situations where things haven’t meshed well and that’s when they tend to struggle at times, like this year.

The Hogs have a decided edge in experience.

And, of course, Anderson totally dismissed that as being an advantage at this time of the year.

“This day in time, it doesn’t matter what class your players are,” he said. “Freshmen these days are very, very talented. Hopefully some of our experience will help out our younger guys.”

“I don’t know that when the ball is thrown up anyone says this freshman or that senior is doing this or does that,” Kentucky assistant Joel Justus said Monday in Lexington.

At this point in the year, you can throw that one out.

The main thing in Arkansas’ favor, however, can’t be thrown out. That’s the crowd at Bud Walton on what is predicted to be a rainy evening, although the temperature will be in the mid to high 50’s, according to the weather dogs at the local TV stations.

This team seems to feed off the crowd, especially on defense.

And the guess here is that won’t be a problem.