From your description, I think you have missed setting up the browser's selenium driver. For this example I am using ChromeDriver 2.39.562718, found here: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/
For reference, your POM.xml file could have these three dependencies below. But this is not enough. Your will need (for these dependencies) the 'chromedriver.exe' installed in OS path.
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.seleniumhq.selenium/selenium-java -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
<artifactId>selenium-api</artifactId>
<version>3.12.0</version>
</dependency>
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.seleniumhq.selenium/selenium-chrome-driver -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
<artifactId>selenium-chrome-driver</artifactId>
<version>3.12.0</version>
</dependency>
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.seleniumhq.selenium/selenium-support -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
<artifactId>selenium-support</artifactId>
<version>3.12.0</version>
</dependency>
When you execute this code in your test function the OS will find the driver, and execute it setting up the Selenium server connection to the browser. Then the code will launch the Chrome browser, and navigate to the web page (BASE_URL).
driver = new ChromeDriver();
driver.get(BASE_URL);
This also assumes that you are using an updated Chrome browser. I am using Version 67.0.3396.62 (Official Build) (64-bit) with that version of Chrome driver.