PITTSBURGH — So much for any concerns Pittsburgh coach Jamie Dixon had about his team looking past DePaul to showdowns next week with No. 3 Syracuse and No. 5 Louisville.

Trey Zeigler scored a season-high 18 points and the Panthers crushed DePaul 93-55 on Saturday for their fourth straight victory.

“We feel like every game is a big game, we don’t take any game lightly,” Pitt guard Tray Woodall said. “We just want to make sure we go out and play our game, make sure we want to go out and be aggressive.”

That was hardly a problem for the Panthers (17-4, 5-3 Big East), who took control midway through the first half and never let up on their way to the biggest Big East win in school history.

The 38-point margin of victory was the highest ever by Pitt in a Big East game, eclipsing a 36-point romp over West Virginia in 2003.

“You rarely think you’re going to have games like this in this conference,” Dixon said. “Once we got ahead we didn’t look for our own, we looked for each other. That was the key to sustaining it.”

Lamar Patterson added 15 points and Steven Adams added nine points and a season-high 14 rebounds for Pitt. The Panthers moved into third in the muddled Big East after dominating the reeling Blue Demons.

Not bad for a team that was just 1-3 in the league two weeks ago. Now they have a chance to make some serious noise against the struggling Cardinals on Monday night before hosting the Orange next Saturday.

“I don’t know the standings, I just know we’re playing better,” Dixon said.

And struggling DePaul is not.

Brandon Young led the Blue Demons (10-9, 1-5) with 13 points and Moses Morgan chipped in 11, but DePaul was never in it while losing for the sixth time in seven games. The Blue Demons shot just 27 percent (18 of 65) and were outrebounded 58-34 while suffering their worst loss in nearly two years.

“This is obviously one we’d like to flush away and burn the tape,” DePaul coach Oliver Purnell said.

Dixon was worried about how his team would handle DePaul’s full-court pressure and early on the Blue Demons were able to rattle the Panthers into uncharacteristic mistakes. Pitt came in leading the country in assist/turnover ratio but threw it away six times in the first 10 minutes.

“They wanted to speed us up throughout the game,” Woodall said. “It took time to get used to it, but we wanted to get layups. We took what they gave us and took open shots.”