Good news my friend! This is a fairly easy question to answer. The truth lies in the dictionary. If you have taken the old websters of the shelf lately, you will see that the definition of the universe is something along the lines of everywhere, and everything. The everything part includes time. As you can probably guess, the universe is anywhere that contains the same number and types of dimensions as we have here!

This means that before the big bang, which is often considered the birth, or begining of the universe, there was no time, and as such, it would be very difficult to have anything before (as we define before to be something like previously in time), if there was no time.