Mod_rewrite issues access forbidden when simply replacing urls. How to fix?

Question

htaccess

I decided to learn Laravel, installed it through Composer. It is necessary to replace all calls to index.php in the URL with calls to public/index.php
.htaccess content at the root:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

Options -Indexes

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/index.php

Tried a bunch of ways, but all issue
Access forbidden!
You don't have permission to access the requested directory. There is either no index document or the directory is read-protected.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 403
localhost
Apache
I have been sitting for the fourth day already. I tried about 20 different ways, it doesn't work :(
Windows 7 machine, openserver.
What should I do? Thanks in advance.