Matthew Mitchell has been in a different mood lately.He’s back to joking around with the media, he’s smiling more and he was downright giddy in an interview Tuesday on the signing of Connecticut transfer Samarie Walker.Clearly, things are going well for the Kentucky women’s basketball team of late. That three-game losing streak two weeks ago that had Mitchell steaming mad seems like it was two years ago.The Cats are now riding a four-game winning streak heading into a road date with Ole Miss on Thursday at 9 p.m. In the win over Vanderbilt, Kentucky pounded the Commodores on the glass, dominated the game defensively and thrashed Vandy by 10 points.Flash back to UK’s Elite Eight run last year and you’d have a tough time telling the difference. But two weeks ago, that wasn’t always the case. Overcome by youthful mistakes, offensive inconsistencies and a tough-three game stretch, Kentucky fell into a major midseason funk.The Cats lost three straight to Duke, Arkansas and Georgia, plummeting in the polls from 10th to 19th. Mitchell was furious with his team’s effort in practice and the play of the point guard position.In desperate search of answers, Mitchell made two significant moves that led to the current turnaround. The first was to solve the issue at point guard. Instead of relying on two inexperienced freshmen to run the offense, Mitchell went with his backup plan, A’dia Mathies. Last year’s Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Year slid from small forward to the point, and just like that, the offense started to run more smoothly in the half court.The second thing Mitchell did was examine what he was doing wrong. Instead of digging frustrations any deeper, Mitchell stepped back and took a different approach with his team. Realizing his team wasn’t executing as well as it should, Mitchell moved practices into Memorial Coliseum in order to bring out big-screen TVs. Using those video screens next to the practice court, Mitchell was able to show the players firsthand what they were missing.”Desperation was where the idea originated,” Mitchell said last week. “You just are racking your brain trying to figure out something because we worked very hard. The staff worked hard. The players worked hard. Just for some reason we just could not make the connection. It was just so glaring and we had so much to try to correct (after the loss to Georgia) and the kids seemed so out of sync that I just felt like the immediacy of us watching it, then going to do it seemed like the right thing to do. The players have responded well to it.”As much as those moves worked, the real difference might have been a change in mentality.Although the Cats had gotten off the losing track by the time they traveled to Florida, everything seemed to click when UK fell behind by 10 points to Florida late in the second half.Kentucky stormed back to win that game and the confidence has been soaring ever since. “I think that the Florida win was a great win for us,” Mitchell said. “For us not to play our best for the entire 40 minutes and still be able to come out with a win, I think that everybody will have a hyped sense of awareness that we can’t afford to have stretches in the game where you are not focused and you are not playing well and you are not producing. That’s really what happened to us at Florida.”Freshman Jennifer O’Neill has found a groove, Mathies is excelling at the point and Victoria Dunlap continues to dominate games. All of it came together in the win over Vanderbilt, perhaps UK’s most complete win of the year.”It sure looks like we are gaining maturity,” Mitchell said. “I was so pleased with that win against Vanderbilt. That was such a good win, and they I thought showed a lot of maturity, and they were emphatic enough to get a tough, tough win on the road and understand that we had to come in here and prepare for Vanderbilt. They did a good job.”The thing that I told them yesterday was if we zoom out a little bit and look at the big picture, with five weeks left in the regular season, I think we have room to improve a tremendous amount. I think a lot of the teams this time of the year, they have gotten what they can get out of them and they sort of just have to get through the rest of the season. I think that we are still improving, so that’s exciting on one hand.”Now, the obstacle for the Cats is to find out how to sustain success on the road. Of the Cats’ four losses this year, three have come on the road, with last week’s Florida game nearly being the fourth.A freshman-laded roster was partly to blame for Kentucky’s inconsistencies on the road, but Mitchell is hoping the Cats have finally grasped the difference in playing away from home. “We had some good stretches and then we would on a four- or five-minute drought,” Mitchell said of UK’s latest road game. “Those are the times in the game which we are trying to progress through and not have these long stretches where we don’t score. I think that Sunday, we should have gained some confidence. They were very energetic in practice yesterday so hopefully we will do better on the road this time.”