Playing on the road in the Big Ten has been a difficult situation to be in all season long. Purdue taught Iowa that lesson again Wednesday night.

Iowa scored the first bucket of the game to take a 2-0 lead, but the Boilermakers exploded on offense shortly after that. Purdue went on a 17-0 run after Iowa took the lead, a deficit the Hawkeyes couldn’t come back from. No. 17 Iowa lost, 104-68, in West Lafayette.

That is the biggest win against a ranked team in Purdue history.

“We’re down [17-2],” Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery said. “We’ve got to score, we’ve got to get going. To Luka [Garza’s] credit he helped us hang in a little bit. Other than him, we really didn’t have much going offensively, which puts even more pressure on your defense and your rebounding.”

Nothing went right for the Hawkeyes in the first 20 minutes of the game. Purdue came into its matchup with Iowa averaging 67 points per game. The Boilermakers nearly hit that in one half.

 Purdue went into the break leading 61-36, the most points the Boilermakers have scored in a half under head coach Matt Painter.

Luka Garza again did the heavy lifting for the Hawkeyes against Purdue. His supporting cast didn’t offer much help, however. The junior scored 17 points in the first half on 6-of-10 shooting. Garza didn’t haul in a single rebound in the first half, contributing to Purdue’s domination in that area.

For the game, Garza finished with 26 points and only a single rebound. Iowa’s next highest scorer was forward Ryan Kriener, who finished with nine points.

The Hawkeyes didn’t grab a defensive rebound through the first four minutes of game time. Purdue had a stunning advantage on the glass in the first half. The Boilermakers brought in an offensive rebound after each of their first five missed shots.

“I think the way they pounded us on the glass early — not that they don’t do that, they do that to a lot of people — we have to be better there,” McCaffery said. “You at least need to give yourself a chance if they do miss. What happens, especially on the road, is that when you’re down early you try to get it back all at once, which isn’t going to work.”

The most dominating area for Purdue against the Hawkeyes was shooting from 3-point range. Iowa shot 2-of-13 from 3-point range in the first half. The Hawkeyes didn’t convert their first shot from deep until the 6:14 mark when CJ Fredrick hit a 3-pointer.

Purdue was on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, hitting 11 3’s in the first half on 20 attempts.

Purdue finished with 19 3’s on 34 attempts. The Boilermakers also shot 63 percent from the field compared to Iowa converting on 43 percent of its shots — including only six of its 25 3-pointers.

Four Purdue players scored in double-digits, led by Evan Boudreaux with 18 points.

“I don’t think when we needed to we competed the way we should have,” McCaffery said. “We kinda lost our composure. They benefited from that.”

The loss is Iowa’s second straight on the road. The Hawkeyes now sit at 16-7 on the year and 7-5 in Big Ten play. Iowa returns to Carver-Hawkeye Arena Saturday at 5:07 p.m. looking to avenge a loss from earlier in the season against Nebraska.