There is no sequence of tenses in Russian whatsoever.
The information in a subordinate sentence is understood to be relative to the main clause:
So if the piece of information is simply about where things are or what someone does, use present tense in the subordinate clause.
Use the particle "ли" in reported questions or situations when you don't know which option is true:
The verb говори́ть is used both as "to say, to tell" and as "to talk, to speak". When you report someone's words, obviously, the 2nd meaning is in action:
Russian has a whole set of perfective verbs. The thing is, usually you arrange verbs neatly into closely matching pairs of imperfective + perfective. And these are different for the two meanings of «говори́ть»:
Remember «Скажи́те, пожа́луйста ... » ?
Rather than referring to ongoing actions or past(future) actions in general, perfective verbs refer to actions in a point-wise manner, ignoring the action's inner structure. That is, such "singular" actions happen at some particular "moment" and can be conveniently arranged in a sequence when telling a story. This distinction is about to come into focus in one of the following skills.