Bria Hartley scored 15 points, and No. 3 Connecticut beat No. 5 Duke 61-45 on Monday night to snap the Blue Devils' 34-game winning streak at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Caroline Doty added 11 points for the Huskies (20-2). They shot 45 percent, held Duke to a season-low 24.6-percent shooting and forced 19 consecutive missed shots during a critical stretch of roughly 12 minutes on the way to their 10th straight win.
Chelsea Gray scored 13 points for the Blue Devils (17-3), who had won 11 straight overall. It was their first loss at Cameron since UConn visited two years ago.
Elizabeth Williams added 10 points on 3-of-15 shooting for Duke, and her layup with just under 18 minutes left was the Blue Devils' last basket until Haley Peters hit a 3-pointer with fewer than six minutes remaining.
Duke finished with only eight assists on its 17 baskets after its offense too often disintegrated into one-on-one battles and not enough passing against an aggressive UConn defense.
"It's a great lesson for our team. A great lesson on what not to do offensively, and how not to, I guess, rush yourself and do some things that we shouldn't do," said coach Joanne P. McCallie of Duke.
Duke trailed by 14 late in the first half before putting together a 12-3 run that bridged the break. The Blue Devils forced five turnovers in the first six minutes of the half, and Williams helped Duke close to 34-29 with a free throw with 17:19 left.
That's when UConn took over and began stretching its lead with 3-pointers. The Huskies hit four — two by Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis — in a 9-minute stretch before Tiffany Hayes added a bucket in the lane, pushing it to 50-33 with just over 7 minutes left, and Duke didn't get closer than 12 the rest of the way.
"They did a good job of clogging the lane a little bit, and sometimes we would take too many dribbles," Gray said.
The Huskies entered with the nation's toughest defense by shooting percentage, holding opponents to 30 percent.
The Huskies have dominated this series lately, winning five straight and routing Duke twice last season — including a 36-point loss that ended the Blue Devils' unbeaten start to 2010-11 and a 35-point romp in the NCAA tournament with a Final Four berth on the line.
Unlike those two meetings, this one wasn't over at halftime.
"I hope this team thinks we can beat anybody, and there's something wrong with them if they don't," McCallie said. "And they're really going to regret when they see this film (Tuesday)."
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