BATON ROUGE, La. – Sue Gunter, a Hall of Fame coach and pioneer in women’s college basketball, died Thursday. She was 66.

LSU said Gunter, who had suffered from emphysema, died at her home in Baton Rouge.

She coached for 40 years, 22 at LSU where she took teams to 13 NCAA tournaments and laid the foundation for trips to the NCAA Final Four the past two years.

Gunter coached LSU to an 88-79 victory over Maine in an NCAA tournament first-round game in 1997.

“I learned so much from Sue about the X’s and O’s of the game of basketball,” said Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, the winningest coach in women’s college basketball.

Summitt played on the 1976 U.S. Olympic Team on which Gunter served as an assistant, and she was an assistant to Gunter on the 1980 U.S. team.

“She made playing basketball fun due to her ability to connect with her players,” Summitt said. “Personally, I am going to miss her tremendously and I know the game is going to miss her,”

Gunter had missed only one game in her career – for her mother’s funeral – before suffering a severe emphysema attack on her way to a game in Jan. 2004.

“I’d had some trouble over the years. They’d done a lot of tests, checked my heart,” Gunter said in a 2004 interview with the Associated Press. “They hadn’t identified it, but it wasn’t as sudden as everyone thought.”

The condition forced Gunter, a smoker for more than 30 years before kicking the habit in 1994, to the sidelines for the rest of the 2004 season.

Tethered to an oxygen tank, she continued to attend practices and film sessions for the rest of the season, but was unable to be at games. Her longtime protege, Pokey Chatman, filled in for her and took the team to the Final Four, then was named her successor when Gunter retired at the end of the season.

“It’s obviously been a difficult day for me,” Chatman, who had played for Gunter and joined her staff in 1991, said Thursday. “Not only have I lost a great friend and mentor, but the game of basketball has lost one of its true pioneers. She not only made a huge difference in my life, but in the life of everyone associated with women’s basketball.”