I lived there more or less Z's entire lifetime ago and was mostly too poor to eat out, so I can't suggest much. Shakespeare's Pizza is the iconic Mizzou pizza/bar/hangout joint and I'm pretty sure it's still there. There was a little bar area downtown which I'm sure is still there; at the time it was nothing but the same kind of dive-y student bars but given that craft beer exists now there's got to be something fancy.
There's nothing wrong with Columbia itself, which is a full-on quaint little college town in the sense that there's almost literally nothing in town other than the university. When school was on a break it was a ghost town. The only problem is that it's full of Missourians, who suck ass.