We consider a two--tile reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted wireless network with a two-antenna transmitter and receiver over Rayleigh fading. We show that the average received signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) optimal transmission and combining vectors are given by the left and right singular spaces of the RIS-receiver and transmit-RIS channel matrices, respectively. Moreover, the optimal phases at the two tiles of the RIS are determined by the phases of the elements of the latter spaces. To further study the effect of phase compensation, we statistically characterize the average SNR of all possible combinations of transmission and combining directions pertaining to the latter singular spaces by deriving novel expressions for the outage probability and throughput of each of those modes. Furthermore, for comparison, we derive the corresponding expressions in the absence of RIS. Our results show an approximate SNR improvement of $2$\,dB due to the phase compensation at the RIS.