"We knew inside the locker room, we keep talking about it, keep believing it, but we were getting frustrated because the result wasn't there," Galchenyuk said. "And now that the result is there you feel that confident. But at the same time, you can see how quickly things change. We lost seven in a row at the beginning [of the season], now we've won five in a row and we never want to feel the way that we felt at the beginning of the year."
Nicolas Deslauriers, Jacob de la Rose and Daniel Carr each had a goal and two assists, Charles Hudon had a goal and an assist, and Brendan Gallagher, Jordie Benn and Andrew Shaw scored for the Canadiens, who have outscored Detroit 16-4 in the past two games.
"We're feeling good about tonight but we can't forget where we were a week ago and where we sat in the standings, and can't get too high on ourselves and start to think maybe we're a little bit better than what we are," Byron said. "There's a reason why we've had success playing the way we have this week and we can't stray away from that."
Carey Price made 22 saves in his fifth straight win, all during the Montreal winning streak, which began with a victory against the Buffalo Sabres on Nov. 25 in his return from a lower-body injury. He lost his shutout at 9:46 of the third period when Luke Glendening scored to make it 8-1.
Detroit (10-12-5) is 0-4-3 during a seven-game losing streak, including a 6-3 home loss to the Canadiens on Thursday.