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NEW YORK — In the midst of a career surge that has made him one of rap's biggest stars, Lil Wayne is bracing for a year behind bars after pleading guilty Thursday in a two-year-old gun case.A glum Lil Wayne said little as he admitted illegally having a loaded gun on his tour bus in 2007, moving to end a case that had churned along as he collected Grammys and gold records. He's expected to get a year in jail at his sentencing, set for February.The plea, which came as he boasted the country's No. 1 pop song, makes Lil Wayne the latest in a long line of rappers to face incarceration after topping the charts.Arguably rap's most popular artist, Lil Wayne somberly answered his judge's questions with "yes, sir" and "no, sir" as he pleaded guilty to a felony charge of attempted criminal possession of a weapon.He acknowledged he had a loaded .40-caliber semiautomatic gun when the bus was stopped shortly after a Manhattan concert on July 22, 2007. His lawyer had previously disputed the gun was the rapper's, in part by questioning the reliability of a highly sensitive DNA test that prosecutors said tied him to the weapon.The relationship between chronicling crime and living it has long been an issue in rap. Some of the genre's big names — including Tupac Shakur, Lil' Kim, Beanie Sigel, Shyne, Mystikal and C-Murder— have done a few months to several years behind bars for crimes committed after they became famous.The Manhattan District Attorney's office said small amounts of DNA found on the loaded weapon connected it to Lil Wayne. Defense lawyer Stacey Richman had raised questions about the relatively new technique, used to derive the results from DNA samples that can consist of fewer than roughly 16 human cells.A hearing on the method's level of scientific acceptance started Wednesday and had been expected to continue for days. After Lil Wayne's guilty plea, both prosecutors and Richman stressed that they stood by their contrasting positions on the technique.