Yet another road defeat took a toll on the reeling Hawaii women’s basketball team.

The Rainbow Wahine remained winless on the road in Big West Conference play with a 71-61 defeat at UC Santa Barbara on Saturday. Another road sweep — the wrong kind, as UH lost by two at Cal Poly on Thursday — has coach Laura Beeman scrambling for an answer.

“The losing is hard. As an adult, you can deal with it,” Beeman said in a postgame phone interview. “Where I feel terrible is these kids are broken right now and I gotta figure out how to get them unbroken. That’s the hard part. Right now maybe we’re not good enough to beat people. But if we put it together, we will be.”

Senior guard Sarah Toeaina scored 25 points, vaulting her three spots up the UH career scoring chart to No. 16, past Jade Abele, Jeanne Wade and Destiny King. Point guard Tia Kanoa added 14 points and nine assists in a defeat for UH (9-14, 2-8 BWC), which dropped to 0-6 on the conference road.

Forward Drew Edelman dominated inside, scoring 27 points on 11-for-17 shooting with 12 rebounds for the Gauchos (8-13, 5-4).

UH tried to rally from 23 down late in the third quarter, getting to within 63-57 on a Toeaina free throw with 1:23 to play. Toeaina had a driving layup attempt to get within four with 37 seconds left, but she missed and the Gauchos made eight straight free throws to close the game.

“I thought we made a good run, and then we made some mistakes that get us,” said Beeman. “All I can say is we’re going to keep working our butts off and it’s going to click.”

She said the presence of former assistant Alex Delanian on the UCSB bench was “a nonfactor” for her team.

The Wahine committed 21 turnovers after giving it up 26 times at Cal Poly. UCSB also committed 21 turnovers but capitalized, outscoring UH 26-17 off of giveaways.

“They were able to apply a lot of pressure to Tia, to our wings. They made us play very high on offense,” Beeman said. “We weren’t able to get our offense spacing how we like it. … Where we coughed the ball up, (it) led to a layup. Where they coughed the ball up, (it) didn’t lead to as many second-chance points or layups for us.”