San Diego State made a historic run to the 2023 men’s basketball national championship game with a nine- and sometimes 10-man rotation.

Fifteen months later, all of them are gone.

Three months ago, the Aztecs sent their five starters onto the floor at Boston’s TD Garden for a Sweet 16 matchup against eventual champion Connecticut. All of them, gone.

The new season doesn’t open until November, but the new era in SDSU basketball began last week with summer practices on weekday mornings in the quiet of the JAM Center. The roster is practically unrecognizable.

Six members of a projected 10-man rotation have never worn an Aztecs jersey, and only one averaged more than four points per game (and he slumped in the back half of the season). Three have never played college basketball, and another has logged a mere 67 minutes, nearly all in mop-up duty.

Just under 75 percent of last season’s minutes have departed from exhausted eligibility or the transfer portal, 79.3 percent of the points, 76.5 percent of the rebounds, 83.2 percent of the assists.

Even one of the returnees, Demarshay Johnson Jr., cut his braids, grew a beard and looks nothing like he did before.

The lingering question: Are the Aztecs reloading, or rebuilding?

“You’re flipping rosters, everybody’s flipping rosters,” coach Brian Dutcher said of the turbulence of NIL inducements and unlimited transfers. “It’s not like the pros, where you keep your franchise player for six or seven years, if you’re lucky. It’s just the nature of college athletics now.

“Sometimes you look at it and you get worried, oh, we lost all these players. Then you come out here and watch your new group play and you think, ‘Wow, we’ve got a lot of really good new pieces, a lot of different looks about us.’”

On first glance, this team is taller and longer than recent editions. There are two 7-footers, three 6-10s and a potential starting backcourt trio of 6-3, 6-6 and 6-7. Nine of the 12 scholarship players are 6-6 or taller.

It also skews considerably younger, though, in an age where programs get old and stay old via the transfer portal. In the 2023 championship game, Dutcher employed a nine-man rotation of all juniors, seniors, fifth-year seniors and one sixth-year senior. The average age of the starting unit was older than several in the NBA.

Last year, one freshman got regular minutes, backup center Miles Heide.

This year, three could: redshirt freshman Magoon Gwath and incoming freshmen Taj Degourville and Pharaoh Compton. One probably will start.

All three could get time at a 4-spot that is notably devoid of experience after the departures of all-American forward Jaedon LeDee, Jay Pal, Elijah Saunders and Micah Parrish (who occasionally played there in small lineups).

The initial thought was to use the remaining available scholarship on a veteran 4 who could shift to the 3 as the youngsters gained their footing. Mawot Mag, a defensive-minded 6-7 grad transfer from Rutgers, was targeted from the portal and seemed poised to commit to SDSU, only to flip to BYU at the last moment.

Then Dutcher got to see his freshmen in summer workouts and shifted to a more patient strategy, particularly with the portal in July resembling a thrift store remainder rack.

“Sometimes you get nervous, but our freshmen are good enough to play,” said Dutcher, who has typically used only 12 of his allotted 13 scholarships to avoid chemistry issues from too many players and not enough minutes. “I’d rather throw a couple of these freshmen out there and not bring in a guy who might take minutes away from them.

“I’m not looking for a piece. If I take a guy, it’s someone I feel would make a huge difference. But I don’t know if that guy’s out there right now.”

That could mean a starting lineup that looks like this: Florida Atlantic transfer Nick Boyd at point, returnees Reese Waters and Miles Byrd on the wings, Gwath at the 4 and either Middle Tennessee grad transfer Jared Coleman-Jones or sophomore returnee Miles Heide at the 5. Two true freshmen and little-used sophomore BJ Davis would come off the bench.

Boyd has instantly assumed a vocal leadership role, which was one of the reasons they pursued him so vigorously in addition to his ability to play off ball screens and shoot 3s (he made four against the Aztecs in the 2023 Final Four matchup against Florida Atlantic).

USD senior transfer Wayne McKinney III has also asserted his voice in practice, which is a welcome change from a 2023-24 team that had more reserved leaders.

“Everybody knew it was something we weren’t great at last year,” Dutcher said. “We had great leaders with their play, but verbally maybe we weren’t as good as we could have been. This group has a good chemistry about them. They seem to be more verbal than last year’s group, which is a good thing.”

That includes junior Miles Byrd, who has either two or three remaining years of eligibility depending on whether he applies for a medical waiver from a 2022-23 freshman season abbreviated by injury and illness.

“My first two years, I was always behind a lot of older guys who were helping me along and teaching me things,” Byrd said. “But the way I look at it, those two years prepped me for right now. We have a whole new group in here, a lot of new faces, a lot of young guys who have never experienced college basketball before, so it’s helping me step up as a leader.”

His take on the roster renovations?

“Young and hungry with tons of energy,” he said.

In a departure from previous years, the team breaks huddles with “One, two, three … dawgs” instead of “family.”

Explained Byrd: “We’ve got a lot of dawgs on our team. We’re ready to get after it.”

There will be growing pains, no doubt, particularly with a brutal November schedule that likely will include a home game against Gonzaga and three in the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas against Texas A&M, Oregon and Creighton. All four appear in early top 25 rankings.

That puts a premium on summer workouts, which are limited to eight hours a week. Of that, usually four are spent on the floor in a five-on-five setting.

The learning curve is steep. This is about teaching, not tweaking.

“They’re going to do some things better than teams of the past,” Dutcher said, “and they’re going to struggle in some areas, too, where maybe teams of the past were good. It’s all part of coaching. It’s the puzzle of coaching. You get them all out here and you kind of figure it out together.

“I had some friends at practice today who just shook their head in awe at some of the pieces we have and look at the upside. There’s a lot of potential with this group. How soon it comes together, you never know that. Obviously, we want to be good right away, but sometimes it takes a little bit of game minutes together to figure out what it is. But we have the pieces.”

The pundits, so far, aren’t convinced. The Aztecs, one of just seven programs to reach back-to-back Sweet 16s, appear in no prominent preseason top 25s. Nevada Sports Net picks them to finish seventh in the 11-school Mountain West.

“We see that stuff,” Byrd said. “We really don’t play it no mind. It’s still the second week of July. The season is not for another four months. … But going into the season, we’re definitely going to have that hunger and be ready to shock some people.

“But people shouldn’t be shocked. It’s San Diego State.”