Walsall-born Keates, who watched as his side suffered their fourth league defeat in a row, admitted that his team are in free fall as on-loan Birmingham City left-back Steve Seddon scored the only goal of the game to boost the Dons' hopes of securing survival before the end of the season.
The Saddlers have now won just one of their last twelve league outings and must find a way to secure some much-needed points soon or face the prospect of a return to the fourth tier of the English game for the first time in over a decade.
Speaking to the assembled media, Dean said; "It’s not a good position and there’s no papering over cracks. We are free-falling and we will be considered everybody’s favourites to go down even though we are eighth from bottom and there are seven teams below us.
"It’s still in our hands but we need to find something, we need a building block to build on, something to stop the rot. It hurts. It’s my hometown club and I’ll get judged on results but all of us, we have to stand up and be counted."
Keates, who is in the first year of a three-year contract at Banks's Stadium, went on to admit that one of the major differences between this spell of the season and the one which saw them battling among the Play-Off hopefuls is confidence.
The manager continued; "It’s confidence, confidence and momentum are massive in football. When you are up there and you are flying, everything goes for you.
"When you are down there, you start over-analysing, this goes against us, that goes against us, a bobble goes against us, you’re hanging on to every decision that the referee doesn’t give you. We’ve got to get away from that.
"There’s only us that can turn it around and we have to be braver. We’ve got to get back what it was. There’s seven teams who would rather be in our position."