Kayli Murphy and Danielle Orsillo aren’t used to this.

It took more than 30 minutes for the pair of senior leaders of the ASU women’s basketball team to emerge from the locker room following their game against Washington State and quietly take their seats in the media room.

Heads were down. Shoulders were slouched. Answers were short.

That’s because the Sun Devils haven’t suffered this type of defeat since Orsillo or Murphy first donned the Maroon and Gold.

ASU lost 66-62 to a WSU team that came into the contest on an 11-game losing streak, had not won a conference game all season and had not earned a victory in Tempe since 1997.

“Obviously, it shows any team can beat any other team any given [day], and we didn’t show up,” Murphy said. “We can’t expect ourselves just to win when we don’t show up, and we didn’t do that.”

The ASU loss snapped a 10-game winning streak against the Cougars (6-16, 1-10 Pac-10) dating back to the 2003-04 season.

“The commitment to the bigger cause is not always there, and they know it,” ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said of her team. “Whenever we come out and we don’t have that sense of unity and togetherness, we don’t win. With mature teams with a sense of urgency, you get that game in and game out. Well, this team doesn’t have that.”

The Sun Devils (14-8, 6-5 Pac-10) were burned in an all-around sloppy game by poor shooting and carelessness with the ball, as they committed a season-high 29 turnovers (WSU had 28) and made just 37.3 percent of their field-goal attempts and 15 of their 27 free throws.

“You’re not going to beat anybody in the Pac-10 when you miss layups and you miss free throws and you turn the ball over,” Turner Thorne said. “It’s amazing that it was such a close game, to be honest. When we take care of the ball, I think we’re as good as anybody in the country…but if we don’t take care of the ball, we can’t beat anybody, and that’s been our story all year long.”

The Sun Devils were also unable to stop WSU sophomore guard April Cook, who scored a career-high 33 points on 13-of-18 shooting.

“We gave [Cook] the confidence in the beginning,” Murphy said. “We were kind of letting her be comfortable [while] dribbling [the ball] around, and we never really did make the adjustment to pressure her like we should have. She’s a great player, but we just didn’t play our defense against her.”

The Cougars took their first lead since the game’s early stages when a 3-pointer by Cook made the score 45-44 with 7:47 to play.

WSU never trailed again, as Cook and freshman guard KiKi Moore combined for 16 of the Cougars’ final 21 points.

“Every time we left someone open down the stretch, they hit the shot,” Turner Thorne said. “Should they have been open? No, not against us. We just weren’t locked in.”

WSU held a 57-52 advantage with 3:10 to play, and ASU struggled to make free throws that would have cut into that lead much quicker. Sophomore center Kali Bennett missed one at the 2:56 mark that would have made it a five-point game, and junior guard Tenaya Watson missed a freebie with 1:35 to play that would have made it a four-point game and then another with 16 seconds to play that would have sliced the Cougar lead to 64-63.

The Sun Devils almost got the steal on the Cougars’ ensuing possession, but they could not come up with the loose ball, and WSU sophomore guard/forward Rosie Tarnowski hit the two free throws to ice the game.

ASU built a 17-4 first-half lead when a pair of free throws by freshman center Joy Burke at the 10:53 mark capped a 13-0 run that lasted almost eight minutes.

But the Cougars answered when a jumper by Cook ignited their own 10-0 spurt to slash the Sun Devils’ lead to 17-14 with 7:21 left before the break.

The Sun Devils stretched that lead back up to seven on a free throw by Bennett with just under two minutes until halftime before the Cougars cut it to 29-26 at intermission.

ASU matched its largest lead of the second half when a 3-pointer in the corner by sophomore guard Alex Earl made the score 44-37 with 10:12 to play before WSU staged a 7-0 run to grab the lead it would never relinquish.

“It comes down to just us playing soft,” Orsillo said. “We were soft on defense, [and] they scored. We were soft on offense, [and] we turned the ball over. We didn’t create very many open shots for each other. You can’t play at the [Division I] level playing soft.”

Murphy scored 14 points and grabbed 10 rebounds to notch her second straight double-double, while Watson finished with 11 points, eight rebounds and four steals.

Bennett was also in double figures with 10 points, but she made just two of her 11 field-goal attempts that included multiple layups. Earl also scored 10 points.

Moore scored 14 of her 16 points in the second half for WSU and added four steals but also committed 13 turnovers.

Reach the reporter at gina.mizell@asu.edu