STARKVILLE — Mississippi State won another series and advanced through the first round of the Southeastern Conference Tournament. Now it’ll try to win an SEC championship.

Austin Sexton allowed one unearned run in seven innings, Nathaniel Lowe went 2-for-3 with an RBI and a run scored, and Mississippi State beat Arkansas 5-1 Friday night at Dudy Noble Field.

“Sometimes, you leave runs out there. Situationally, we would like to have done some more stuff. However, we did enough on the mound. Tomorrow, we have a chance to do something special,” Mississippi State coach John Cohen said.

Mississippi State (39-14-1, 20-9 SEC) remained tied atop the SEC West Division — and the overall standings — with Texas A&M (41-12, 20-9), which beat Ole Miss 11-5 on Friday.

Texas A&M owns the tiebreaker between the teams, and will win the division by beating Ole Miss in Saturday’s regular-season finale. The Aggies will also win the SEC regular-season title with a win.

Mississippi State needs to finish its sweep of Arkansas (26-28, 7-22) and get some help from hated in-state rival Ole Miss to win the conference championship. Regardless of how the title picture shakes out, the Bulldogs have earned a first-round bye in next week’s SEC Tournament in Hoover, Ala.

Mississippi State last won the SEC regular-season championship in 1989 and has not won a Western Division championship under the present-day format.

The 20 league wins for MSU matches the 1989 squad for most in a season.

“We’ve put ourselves in a position where the last two games of the season really matter,” Cohen said. “Back in the Stone Age, when I was playing baseball on this field, we had no idea who was winning what game. We live in a different age now. Our kids are acutely aware of what’s going on. But they’ve done a magnificent job of focusing in on what we can control and what’s in front of us. Tomorrow will be another huge day for us. It’ll be a huge day for a lot of schools in this great league, because so much is at stake.”

The Bulldogs again rode stellar pitching to put away the Razorbacks. Dakota Hudson threw a five-hit shutout in Thursday night’s win. On Friday, Austin Sexton and Reid Humphreys combined to hold the Razorbacks to five hits and no earned runs.

Sexton (7-2) allowed four hits and one run over seven innings of work, with seven strikeouts and two walks. Humphreys struck out three and worked around one hit in two innings of work for his seventh save.

“This was one of those games where you just try to hang in there,” Cohen said. “If we don’t throw the ball away on a high chopper, they don’t score. Austin was able to throw a bunch of changeups early in the count and then put them away with the fastball.”

The Bulldogs erased an early 1-0 deficit with three runs in the third inning. John Holland reached as a hit batsman, Jake Mangum singled and Jack Kruger walked to load the bases. Nathaniel Lowe hit a sacrifice fly to tie the game, and a throwing error then allowed the other two runs to come home.

In the eighth inning, the Bulldogs again loaded the bases on consecutive singles by Lowe, Gavin Collins and Jacob Robson. After back-to-back strikeouts, Ryan Gridley had an RBI single, while another run scored when the ball was thrown away on the infield.

MSU finished with eight hits, which snapped a string of six straight games with 10 or more hits. Gridley had three.