TAMPA, Fla. -- The Nashville Predators proved efficiently effective to claim their second victory in the past six games.

The Predators scored six goals on 18 shots, led by Colton Sissons' first career hat trick, to beat the Tampa Bay Lightning 6-1 on Thursday night at Amalie Arena.

"It's kind of surreal, honestly, right now," Sissons said of his first career multi-goal game. "I've been struggling to put the puck in the back of the net in general so to pot three tonight, it feels pretty good."

Pekka Rinne stopped 27 shots for Nashville. Ryan Ellis, Mike Fisher and Filip Forsberg also scored.

"We always want to create more chances than we did, but at the same time we had really good execution when we had the chances," said Forsberg, who has goals in six of the past nine games.

Tyler Johnson scored on the power play for Tampa Bay and Andrei Vasilevskiy finished with just 13 saves for the Lightning, who dropped the final two games of a five-game homestand.

Tampa Bay had picked up points in seven of the previous eight games before losing the past two.

"Results are what you need obviously, but today was a better effort than the one that was last game," Tampa Bay defenseman Victor Hedman said. "You know the scores not close, but at the same time you have got to look at what you did good and I think the effort was there. It was physical, we were engaged and it's just unfortunate we couldn't keep the puck out of our own net."

Nashville cashed in on an early power play chance when Ryan Johansen fed a perfect pass across the crease area to an open Fisher cutting in from the circle for a backdoor tap-in just 2:25 in to the game.

The Predators grabbed a two-goal lead early in the second period on an innocent play when Forsberg delivered a wrist shot from the right circle that found a seam past two players in front and surprised Vasilevskiy as it found the top corner at 3:56.

The Lightning cut that lead in half on the power play when Johnson stepped in to a snapshot from the right circle for his 12th of the season to give Tampa Bay momentum.

The ice was tilted in the Lightning's favor, but it all came to a halt when Sissons sent a shot from the middle of the right circle that tipped off the stick of Hedman and knuckled over Vasilevskiy's glove at 13:21 to regain the two-goal lead.

Nashville added to the lead less than a minute later on Ellis' shot, again from the right side of the ice, that beat Vasilevskiy to the glove side again.

The goal was originally waived off for incidental contact with the goaltender but was overturned on a challenge from Nashville. Tampa Bay then challenged that the entry play was offside, but replay proved inconclusive as the puck sailed high as it crossed the blue line.

"I think they had a couple seeing-eye ones that went in, kind of changed the momentum of the game," Johnson said. "I thought we were working, but we weren't our best. We didn't respond well enough to take over the game, and obviously that's tough."

The Predators scored their fourth goal on just their ninth shot of the game.

Tampa Bay was unable to mount any sort of a comeback and Sissons added his second goal of the game in to an empty net with 5:58 left in the third period . Sissons completed the hat trick, stuffing in a rebound off Calle Jarnkrok's shot with 3:00 left in the game.

"We defended. We worked. We had 70 shot attempts at the net. We held them to barely 35 or something like that. There's a lot to build on that," Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said.

"We didn't really give them much the whole night. It's hard to say if the score was indicative of the game, but we're going to wake up in the morning and it's going to say 6-1."

NOTES: The Predators finished with 24 blocked shots. Nashville RW James Neal did not take part in the morning skate for what the team called "maintenance" but was scratched with a lower-body injury. ... Predators LW Viktor Arvidsson appeared in his 100th career game. ... Nashville recalled D Anthony Bitetto from a conditioning assignment. ... Tampa Bay G Adam Wilcox, called up from Syracuse of the American Hockey League on Wednesday, became the sixth member of Tampa Bay's 2011 draft class to dress for a game in the NHL. All six members of that draft class dressed Thursday: Nikita Kucherov, Matthew Peca, Nikita Nesterov, Ondrej Palat, Vladislav Namestnikov and Wilcox. ... Nashville D Petter Granberg was scratched. ... Tampa Bay D Andrej Sustr was a healthy scratch.