You could avoided the 5 straight greens without success, but I don’t see how you could have avoided the possibility of a loss (maybe depending on what your first guess was). For me, with those 4 known letters (yours had to be the same as mine), there were 6 remaining possible letters, and I couldn’t guess all 6. So unless your first guess already had only of those 6, you were doomed to a possible loss. (Your situation might have been worse than mine, since you didn’t even know where your yellows belonged.)
Oops: mis-analysis. You might have been in better shape than me. I was constrained to putting a T in spot 4, which means I needed a separate guess for TASTE. Conceivably you could have guessed a T in spot 1, with perhaps an H elsewhere, covering 2 of my possibilities in one guess. Or similar with a possible letter besides H
