One-way randomized communication complexity of Greater-Than
If you look at the MNSW proof carefully, the base case can be taken to be the trivial fact that a $0$-round protocol for $\textrm{GT}_n$ with $n = 1$ requires one bit of communication.
If the goal is simply to convince oneself from first principles that $\textrm{R}^\to(\textrm{GT}_n) = \Omega(n)$, this is immediate by reduction from the AUGMENTED-INDEX problem. An $\Omega(n)$ one-way lower bound for AUG-INDEX boils down to the chain rule for mutual information. For a discussion of AUG-INDEX, see, e.g., Section 3.4 of Jelani Nelson's PhD thesis (https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~minilek/publications/papers/phd_thesis.pdf).