After last season’s disappointing campaign, Gloucester head coach George Skivington explained the improvement.
He said: “Going into last season, we were a tough side but we then got the training programme wrong as we didn’t work the boys hard enough by focusing more on the recovery.
“We have to be brave and back ourselves in adopting our new attacking approach and tonight we did but Bristol got through us a few too many times.
“We showed a lot of character being physical in defence. There were a lot of helter-skelter moments but we deserved to win.”
Bristol DoR Pat Lam said: “It was a great ...