The Florida Gators men’s basketball team’s win on Saturday over the Georgia Bulldogs pushed Florida’s record to 5-0 in conference play after two full weeks of intraconference competition.

And that gives the Gators a shot at going 6-0 in SEC play, something that has happened only very, very rarely — and recently — in program history, as sports information director Denver Parler noted on Twitter on Sunday.

.@MikeWhiteUF will try to lead @GatorsMBK to a 6-0 SEC start, something only 1 other coach in team history has done (Donovan, 4x in 19 yrs). pic.twitter.com/uTIbTDp7ci — Denver Parler (@denverparler) January 15, 2017

For perspective, the @SEC has been around since 1932 & this is UF's seventh 5-0 start in conference play ever. — Denver Parler (@denverparler) January 15, 2017

All four of those 6-0 starts, by the way, have happened since 2003. Three of them were by Florida teams that made the Elite Eight, two were by Final Four squads, and one — but only one — was by an eventual national champion.

This 2016-17 Florida team is off to a better start in conference play than Billy Donovan’s Gators were in 2000, before they made their run to the NCAA Tournament final, and a better one than the 2005-06 Gators who won the program’s first national title cobbled together. That may not mean a whole lot, especially given that Florida has not played an NCAA Tournament lock in SEC play to this point — but it does mean that this team is doing something few of its predecessors did.

Looking at this year’s national landscape also puts Florida’s feat into better context.

Florida is one of just seven teams in the ACC, AAC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and SEC — conferences that are home to every national champion since 1991, and all but one since 1966 — with a 5-0 record in conference play. And the other six teams — Arizona, Cincinnati, Kansas, Kentucky, Notre Dame, and Oregon — all made the 2016 NCAA Tournament and finished in the top 32 of Ken Pomeroy’s rankings last year.

Florida wasn’t far off on either of those counts, narrowly missing March Madness and finishing at No. 35 in KenPom. But the Gators have arguably taken a bigger step forward in Mike White’s second year than any of those other programs, all of which are helmed by coaches in at least their fifth seasons at their respective schools.

Their next task will be matching up with the eighth and final unbeaten from those major conferences, South Carolina, on Wednesday. The Gamecocks are 4-0 in SEC play — missing 5-0 by virtue of their exclusion from the Big 12/SEC Challenge, which did not necessitate them playing an SEC game in December, as both Florida and Kentucky did — and have KenPom’s No. 1 defense.

If Florida is to take another step up into ever more rarified air, the Gators will have to pass a rigorous test to do so.