PITTSBURGH — Steven Adams isn’t exactly an expert on Pitt basketball history.

All the freshman center knows is the Panthers have been pretty good for about as long as he can remember. Tell him the team actually missed the NCAA tournament for the first time under coach Jamie Dixon, and the 7-footer from New Zealand shrugs his massive shoulders.

“I don’t care about last year,” he said through a thick Kiwi accent.

Funny, neither do the rest of his teammates.

True, the Panthers actually won a championship last spring, but the College Basketball Invitational isn’t the kind of thing programs that are used to making deep runs in the NCAAs put on their resume. In most ways, 2011-12 was a lost season the moment point guard Tray Woodall went down with a lingering abdominal injury that forced him to sit 11 games and sent the Panthers into a tailspin in which they never recovered.

Woodall insisted Thursday he’s “100 percent” but brushes off any talk that this is his team now that Ashton Gibbs has graduated.

“This is the coach’s team,” Woodall said. “As players, all we can do is focus on getting back to playing Pitt basketball.”

Something the Panthers rarely did last winter. Their defense, normally one of the toughest in the country, looked ordinary in home losses to teams like Wagner, Long Beach State and Rutgers.

“It was embarrassing,” said junior forward Lamar Patterson.

And now it’s over.

Pitt isn’t focused on this season being one of redemption as much as transition. The Panthers are leaving the Big East for the ACC next summer and Woodall plans to leave the conference the same way he came in, with a league title.

“That’s what our goal always is,” Woodall said. “I think we’ve got the depth this year where we think we can do it.”

It’s only October, sure, but even Dixon is surprisingly optimistic. Following a season in which nothing seemed to go right and he had to scrape some nights to find 10 healthy bodies to practice, he’s eagerly accepted the job of trying to figure out how to get 15 guys on the floor.