LOS ANGELES - It's no secret among college basketball coaches across the country that it doesn't matter how your team starts the regular season, but rather, how it finishes.

For first-year Cal coach Mike Montgomery, it's something that he's made a point to emphasize to his players with the conference schedule in full swing and March looming closer and closer.

Of course, it wasn't that long ago that the Golden Bears started picking up steam and even some national recognition with a 4-0 start to the Pac-10 season, in part thanks to home wins over Arizona and Arizona State along with a road sweep of the Washington schools the following week.

What followed for Cal was a first-place tie with UCLA in the Pac-10 and an AP top 25 ranking, the school's first since the 2002-03 season.

Yet a lot more has gone wrong than right for Montgomery's team in the last two weeks, and the No. 17-ranked Bruins continued to add to the Bears' recent struggles with Thursday night's 81-66 victory at Pauley Pavilion.

"We got physically dominated tonight," Montgomery confessed afterward outside Cal's locker room. "You can't do that against UCLA ... We never did anything well enough to win this game."

It was a conference game that not long ago looked like it had the potential to feature two top 25 teams and possibly have significant implications in deciding this year's Pac-10 regular-season champion.

Losing back-to-back games to Stanford and Oregon State, though, quickly dropped Cal from the polls as Montgomery saw his team get leapfrogged in the Pac-10 standings last week by Washington and fall into a three-way tie for second with Arizona State and UCLA.

So with Washington losing to Arizona Thurday night in Tucson and No. 14 Arizona State also falling at home to Washington State, Montgomery knew that his team had a chance to return to the top of the conference standings with an upset in Westwood.

But despite sitting second in the Pac-10 in assist-to-turnover ratio coming into Thursday night's contest, the Bears committed their first turnover within the first two minutes of the game and saw a snowball effect like no other, leading to a whopping 16 turnovers in the first half before finishing the game with 21 (compared to UCLA's 17).

"Basketball is a game of performance," Montgomery explained. "If we can't execute, we are going to struggle. Sixteen turnovers (in the first half) is a whole games worth. They just physically took us out of the ballgame."

Junior point guard Jerome Randle, who came into the game with team-high averages of 19 points and 5.2 assists per game, accounted for a game-high six of those turnovers, though he did knock down three of his six three-point attempts to finish with 11 points and four assists.

Junior forward Theo Robertson, meanwhile, was the only other Cal player in double figures, finishing with a game-high 19 points - all in the second half - on 6-of-9 shooting, including an impressive 4-of-5 from three.

"Playing on the road in this league is very difficult," he said after the loss and with a group of reporters huddled around him. "You can't give them easy looks."

Because when a team shoots 65.2 percent in the second half, it's going to be almost impossible for them to lose under any circumstances.

That's what UCLA (16-4 overall, 6-2 Pac-10) did tonight after knocking down 13-of-28 (46.4 percent) in the first half in route to a 31-23 halftime lead.

Darren Collison led the charge for the Bruins with a team-high 18 points and five assists, and freshman Jrue Holiday chipped in 13 points, five rebounds and four assists in 26 minutes.

"Better people, better places," Montgomery said, giving me a long stare and shrugging his shoulders when I asked him about the Bears' recent struggles, losing three of their last four games.

"You don't perform and you're not going to win."

Even in a weak year for the Pac-10, Montgomery's words still ring true.

Yet with a critical matchup Saturday at the Galen Center against USC, Cal needs a split in L.A. if it wants to have any part in the Pac-10 title race the rest of this season.

And surprisingly, for as bad as they looked at times tonight, the Bears (16-5, 5-3) did get as close as three, 31-28, with 18:22 left in the second half.

But with the Bruins burning through the nets, Ben Howland's team put an end quickly to Cal's 5-0 run with a 7-0 run of its own and extended the lead all the way to 21 at the 12:16 mark on Michael Roll's two free throws.

"I was really excited with the win against a very good Cal team," Howland offered. "I think our defensive intensity was the key ... Our offense really started with good defense."

The same can't be said for the Bears and Montgomery, who had little good to say about his club afterward.

"Nobody stood out tonight," the former Stanford and Golden State Warriors coach remarked. "When our offense does not go well, we don't defend as well as we should and this can lead to our problems."

With the way the conference landscape has unfolded so far, maybe that's just life in the Pac-10 this season.

To check out my latest power rankings, click here.