OXFORD – No. 13 Ole Miss might have been down Thursday night. But the Rebels never really felt like they were out.

Despite trailing by 19 points in the second quarter, Ole Miss roared back against No. 18 Notre Dame and took its first lead of the game late in the third on a 3-pointer from senior Debreasha Powe and kept its unbeaten start to the season alive with a 69-62 win over the Fighting Irish in the ACC/SEC Challenge at SJB Pavilion.

Senior forward Cotie McMahon led Ole Miss (8-0) with 22 points, while senior Christeen Iwuala scored 18 points and grabbed a team-high 13 points. Thursday’s win tied for the largest comeback in program history.

Notre Dame (5-2) scored just eight points over the final eight minutes of the game.

“It’s everything you really ever ask for,” Iwuala said. “I came here to compete on a high level, and I feel like we did that against really good competition and I was able to play on a really big field. And I felt really happy that we got the win so … it was awesome.”

Star guard Hannah Hidalgo, who entered the game as the nation’s second-leading scorer at 27 points per game, scored 14 of the Fighting Irish’s 26 first-quarter points, and Notre Dame broke a 14-all tie with a 12-0 run to end the period. The Fighting Irish led by as many as 19 with just over five minutes left in the half, though the Rebels cut the deficit to eight at halftime by holding Notre Dame scoreless for the final 3:25. Ole Miss finished the half on a 7-0 run while the Fighting Irish missed their final eight shot attempts from the field. Hidalgo scored just 4 points in the second and finished with a game-high 28 points overall.

“Hidalgo is so dynamic, she makes you question what you do,” Ole Miss head coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin said. “So in the first quarter we were like ‘Oh we have to trap her,’ and all this stuff. And it really messed us up, because that’s just not who we are. And after we were getting our butts whooped with it, I just told the team — and you can see the change start in the second quarter — I just said ‘We’re going to play how we play. And if we lose, we’ll lose that way.’”

Ole Miss cut the lead down to five on four separate occasions in the third quarter and down to three twice on a layup from McMahon and again with 2:29 left on a 3-pointer from senior guard Denim DeShields. Trailing by two, Powe hit a 3-pointer with 48 seconds remaining that gave Ole Miss its first lead, part of a 9-2 run to end the quarter that gave the Rebels a 50-49 lead into the fourth.

Iwuala broke a 54-54 tie with a free throw with 6:42 left in the fourth. Notre Dame missed eight of its final 12 shots in the game, and while Hidalgo’s layup with 39 seconds left cut what had been a seven-point lead down to three, Iwuala put the finishing touches on the game and answered with a layup of her own.

“I think for our team, it definitely gives them a level of confidence. No question,” McPhee-McCuin said. “This is our first top-25 game with this team, and so there was a lot of newness, and a lot of our players hadn’t been in this environment before … Honestly, none of them in the role that we had them in. And so it was pretty special for us.”

Ole Miss plays Kansas State in the Bill Snyder Classic Sunday at 2 p.m. The game will be broadcast on ESPN+.