Tank Byard would like to play inside Boardwalk Hall in his hometown of Atlantic City. To do that, Byard and his Rider teammates needed to get off a nine-game losing streak and on the board in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference. Byard scored the Broncs’ final seven points over the last 1:10 and they got off the deck to beat Niagara, 68-65, on Sunday afternoon at the Gallagher Center and split the Western New York trip. “It would have been a very quiet bus ride if we didn’t,” Byard said. Rider was embarrassed on Friday night in an 18-point loss to what was a winless Canisius at the time. Coach Kevin Baggett called that defeat — a ninth in a row that matched the longest winless run since the 1988-89 season — the low point for his program. The only acceptable response was to play with pride. “The guys felt like everybody let one another down and it started with me and all the way down,” Baggett said. “For those guys to come together and rally, it was one of those where it was just about pride. If you are going to win this game, it’s going to come down to that.” Byard was the hero after he subbed in to replace Tariq Ingraham when the starting center fouled out with 1:45 left. All Byard did was score the last seven Rider points, beginning when he converted a three-point play with 1:08 to go for a 64-61 lead. The 6-8 transfer from Alcorn State was averaging 2.3 points in 10 appearances entering play on Sunday, but scored nine of his 12 points in the second half. He also connected on 4-of-6 free throws in the last 24 seconds and had a big steal of an inbound pass with 14 seconds remaining. Byard’s two free throws with six seconds left put the Broncs up three and they finally got to celebrate a victory when Niagara missed a 3-pointer to force overtime. “It was a little nerve-wracking for us because we knew we should have won that game (Friday) and we lost by so much,” Byard said. “We had to come here with a mentality to get a victory.” T.J. Weeks Jr. scored a game-high 18 points and Jay Alvarez added 13 for Rider (5-11, 1-4). The Broncs were 7-of-18 from beyond the arc, which matched the seven 3s that Niagara made as they did a better job of running shooters off the line. Justice Smith paced four players in double figures for Niagara (7-9, 2-3) with 17 points and big man Jhaylon Martinez had 13 before he also fouled out. Four of the Broncs’ five MAAC contests have been a one-possession game in the final minute and have been decided by a grand total of 12 points. “I know we’ve been struggling to get this win and get off this losing streak, but we’ve never thought that we are out of it or not good enough to be a good team in this league,” Baggett said. “Things that could go wrong did go wrong and sometimes when you are in a losing way losing things tend to happen to you. “Today we made the big plays, we got the big rebounds, we made big free throws. It was just a team effort from start to finish. You could hear everybody on the bench, everybody was in it.” Rider is back in action Thursday when it hosts Mount St. Mary’s. It has to build on this. “Our first three games we lost in the MAAC were off a buzzer beater,” Byard said. “If it’s that close of a game, we’re not that far off. We have to get over that little hump that we finally got over. Hopefully, this can bring momentum to the next game and the game after that.”