NEW YORK — It was impossible not to think of the Big East when Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, two former members of the conference, met in the Jimmy V Classic at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night.

The teams didn’t have to stage an old-fashioned defensive battle with plenty of missed shots and key rebounds.

But they did.

Titus Rubles’ rebound basket with 4.2 seconds to play gave Cincinnati a 44-43 victory over previously unbeaten Pittsburgh.

It was appropriate the winning points came on a missed shot in a game where neither team shot 38 percent from the field.

“I thought it was beautiful,” Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin said when somebody brought up the word ugly to describe the game.

“I don’t know what game you were watching,” said Justin Jackson, who led the Bearcats with 12 points.

The Bearcats (8-2) had lost two straight, the last of which was a 64-47 loss to crosstown rival Xavier on Saturday night.

“You’ve got to be able to win these kind of games,” Cronin said. “Our guys were so upset at what happened Saturday night we had guys who couldn’t eat. I was a psychiatrist more than a coach the last few days.”

Most of Jackson’s points came on his seven offensive rebounds. He had nine rebounds total and the Bearcats finished with a 35-27 advantage on the boards, 16-8 on the offensive end.

“We came trying to outrebound them and got outrebounded,” Pittsburgh coach Jamie Dixon said. “We didn’t play well the whole game but we fought back to get the lead and then didn’t do things right when we got there. We knew we had some work to do but I thought our offense was better than that. We didn’t handle their physicality at all.”

Sean Kilpatrick, Cincinnati’s leading scorer at 19.3 points per game, finished with nine on 4-of-13 shooting including going 1 of 8 from 3-point range.

Talib Zanna had 12 points for the Panthers (10-1), one of 14 Division I teams to start the day without a loss, while Lamar Patterson added 11.

Pittsburgh did not have a field goal for a 13:43 stretch in the second half, a drought that ended with a drive by Cameron Wright with 1:07 left that gave the Panthers a 43-42 lead. Patterson missed two free throws with 21 seconds left. Cincinnati worked the clock down and Kilpatrick missed a drive but Rubles got the rebound and scored.