The ugly and painful process of rebuilding a program in the Atlantic Coast Conference is something Georgia Tech coach Brian Gregory has had to stare down since he took the job in 2011.

Georgia Tech hasn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2010. It has had one winning season since. The Yellow Jackets were coming off a 13-18 season and a next-to-last finish in the ACC when Gregory took over, and as soon as he got there he had to deal with declining attendance, the lack of a true home arena, losing star player Iman Shumpert to the NBA Draft, and guiding a team with eight underclassmen.

He learned one thing quickly.

“When you have a young team in this league, you’re going to get your brains beat in,’’ Gregory said.

It took four years for Gregory to get the Yellow Jackets to the point they were at when they came into Conte Forum on Saturday — sitting on 16 wins after three straight victories with a puncher’s chance of returning to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in six years.

But when he looked across the court at Boston College coach Jim Christian and an Eagles bench that was young and shorthanded with A.J. Turner and Jerome Robinson still nursing injuries, he could relate to the battle of trying to pull a team up from the bottom of a conference where the top is crushingly competitive.

“It’s difficult, and I speak from experience on that,’’ Gregory said. “I’ve been in the situation that Jimmy’s in right now.’’

Since the start of conference play, Christian’s challenge has been to somehow keep his team engaged despite losing 15 straight games coming into Saturday.

The Eagles’ 76-71 loss to the Yellow Jackets made it 16 in a row, all in the ACC. The 16 conference losses matches the most for an ACC team, tying Virginia Tech, which went 2-16 each of the past two seasons.

Just last season, the Yellow Jackets’ circumstances were just as dire. They went 3-15 in the ACC, after losing 12 conference games in each of Gregory’s first three seasons. With Saturday’s win, Georgia Tech improved to 17-12, 7-9 in the ACC.

“There’s so many elite players in this league,’’ Gregory said. “Then you get a break and you coach against a guy who’s got 500 wins because the game before the guy was in the Hall of Fame that you coached against.’’

The hardest part of righting the ship was keeping people on it. Last season, sophomore guard Chris Bolden transferred to Tennessee State. The year before that, Tech went 16-17, and sophomore forward Robert Carter Jr. jumped ship to Maryland.

“The thing that’s hard is during the rebuilding process, you get knocked down all the time. The character of the kid has to be so strong because in this day and age, what’s the thing to do? It’s get out of there.

“Unfortunately we lost a couple guys during that, and so it’s a fine line that you’re walking in terms of that. You need really strong character kids.’’

But players such as Marcus Georges-Hunt stuck it out. Georges-Hunt averaged about 12 points a night his first three seasons and suffered through 51 losses. But he became the piece around which Gregory rebuilt the program. He’s started all but one game, climbing up Tech’s scoring list to 14th all time.

“He got his brains beat in for three years now,’’ Gregory said. “He stuck with it, now he’s having as good a senior year as anybody in our league right now.’’

He pulled every string possible for the Yellow Jackets against the Eagles, scoring 23 points on 7-of-7 shooting from the floor and 8 of 10 from the free throw line, with five rebounds and three assists. Tech managed to hold off an Eagles team — led by Eli Carter’s 25 points — that closed the deficit to 3 points with 12 seconds left.

“You can see he’s in command of the game,’’ Gregory said of Georges-Hunt. “He’s in control, he knows what shots to take, when to take them. He’s so efficient.’’

While Gregory and Georgia Tech were starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel, Christian and BC (7-22, 0-16) are still in the thick of a long battle.

“This is a very difficult league to rebuild in,’’ Christian said. “Period. So it takes time. It’s a process. And as I said the whole time, during this process there’s bumps. I take full responsibility. I’m the head basketball coach. But that doesn’t make the process any easier. There are no quick fixes.

“When you’re in the bottom of this league, you’ve got to build your way out of it because the top is very, very heavy and strong.’’

Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com.