LAS VEGAS — It was a battle of tattered scrapbooks, with hallowed uniforms worn by hollow teams.

North Carolina had lost four successive games for the first time in 10 seasons and was outside the Top 25 for the first time in 106 weeks.

UCLA was trying yet another start-over with new coach Mike Cronin and a bunch of misaligned parts.

The unranked teams were predictably rank, with 39 turnovers and 21 missed free throws. In the end North Carolina figured out how to fit a basketball into the cylinder, and wound up winning 74-64 Saturday in the CBS Sports Classic at T-Mobile Arena.

The Bruins (7-5) have played five games outside Pauley Pavilion and have beaten only Chaminade. They are 0-3 against “power conference” teams. An improved Pac-12 awaits.

“We’ve got to get a whole lot better,” Cronin said. “We have to find a guy who can get us a basket or get fouled or make a play. And we can’t beat anybody with 22 turnovers.”

In the first half, the Bruins had 14 turnovers and scored 23 points, missing all six 3-pointers. They did improve that to 4 for 21 overall. But big men Jalen Hill and Cody Riley got only five field-goal attempts and scored eight points.

The only individual light came from Jules Bernard, who scored 16 on 6-for-10 shooting. He and freshman Jaime Jaquez Jr. seem to be the most instinctive Bruins, by far. If one play illustrated the problem, it came from point guard Tyger Campbell, with an open lane to a layup awaiting him in the second half. He drove, then tried some sort of 8.5-degree-of-difficulty no-look pass into a nest of uniforms, without success.

“It’s not some secret sauce,” Cronin said. “People have seen us and they’re double- and triple-teaming our big guys. I’ve won games with these (shooting) numbers. The problem is that we had zero second-chance points in the first half with all those missed shots.

“You’ve got to drive the ball and score or get fouled, and if you can’t, you have to find the open man. It’s not that hard. We’ve struggled mightily in this area.”

With all that, the Bruins scored the first 10 points of the second half and trailed by only one, because they pressed full-court and then trapped in the backcourt. The Tar Heels, young and not overwhelmingly talented with freshman Cole Anthony injured, were so flat-footed that coach Roy Williams asked them if “they wanted me to get their momma” during a timeout.

“Only 24 hours ago, we worked on our press offense,” Williams said. “We really did. After this, every team in America is going to press the crap out of us.”

“But when you don’t score, you can’t really press that much,” Cronin said. “It’s hard to press a turnover.”

“We’re going to have to do more of that during the season,” Bernard said, pointedly. “We see what our length can do if we actually play hard and play aggressively and actually try to get deflections.”

With all the talk of process and patience, there are frustrations. North Carolina’s Garrison Brooks, guarded closely by Hill, inadvertently clipped Hill in the head with an elbow. After a replay, the officials did not call a flagrant foul on Brooks and instead called a common foul on Hill, who briefly had to be restrained. Cronin flung a sheaf of papers on the floor and was called for a technical foul. At the time, UCLA trailed by 10 with 1:33 left.

“They changed the call,” Cronin said, who noted that 13 fouls were called in the first half and 33 in the second. “I thought the officials took the first half off. But I’ve won 89 games in the past three years (at Cincinnati) and these same guys were referring (cq). We were in the bonus in the second half with 13-something minutes left. And we never shot the bonus.”

None of this is a revelation, thanks to three questionable decisions.

Kris Wilkes, Moses Brown and Jaylen Hands all left early for the NBA draft. Only Wilkes and Hands were indeed drafted. Wilkes is with the Knicks but recuperating from an undisclosed illness. Brown is on a two-way contract, playing for either the Portland TrailBlazers or the Texas Legends. Hands is in the G-League with the Long Island Nets.

No one should be telling young men to shun the money. But no one should have told these three young men, in particular, to take adolescent games into grown-man workplaces.

Sometimes the posse of injuries and defections catches up. North Carolina and, presumably, UCLA will return to prime time eventually. Until then, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan should keep the remote on Netflix.