Missouri Just Went Mobile on Sports Betting. Mississippi Is Still Stuck at the Casino.
Missouri went live with sports betting on December 1, 2025. Retail sportsbooks opened, mobile apps went live, and just like that, another state joined the club. Mississippi hasn’t. Bettors here are still stuck placing wagers the same way they did back in 2018: in person, at a casino, nowhere else.
That makes Missouri the 39th state to legalize sports wagering since the Supreme Court tossed out the federal ban in 2018. Nevada had the market to itself for decades. Now nearly four out of every five states let residents bet from their phones, and Mississippi is one of the holdouts.
Missouri’s Rollout
Missouri voters didn’t make this easy on themselves. Amendment 2 passed in November 2024 by roughly fifty votes out of every hundred cast, one of the closest gambling referendums in recent memory. Regulators spent a year building the licensing system before nine sportsbooks flipped the switch at once on launch day: DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, and a few others. bet365 had already locked in a sponsorship with the St. Louis Cardinals months earlier, so its logo was hanging around Busch Stadium before a single Missourian could legally place a mobile bet.
Anyone signing up now can pull the current bet365 Missouri bonus code straight from BetMissouri.com, which tracks the terms as operators change them. The market has settled since the launch-week rush, but the Missouri Gaming Commission’s monthly handle numbers are still running well into nine figures.
Mississippi’s Long Wait Continues
Here’s the twist: Mississippi actually got there first. Retail sports betting became legal back in August 2018, years before Missouri voters even had the option on a ballot. More than thirty casinos along the Gulf Coast and the river take bets in person today, and a handful run mobile apps, but only inside the building. Step off casino property and the app stops working. There’s no version of this where you place a bet from your couch.
Lawmakers keep trying to fix that, and keep failing. House Bill 4074 would have opened up statewide mobile betting while cutting the tax rate on casinos from 8% to 6%. It cleared the House 100-11, a landslide by legislative standards, then died at a Senate deadline in March 2026. A separate bill to ban unregulated sweepstakes casinos died right alongside it. Same session, same dead end, twice.
Public opinion isn’t exactly pushing lawmakers to hurry. A poll commissioned earlier this year found nearly three in four Mississippi voters opposed to legalizing mobile sports betting, with resistance to online casinos running even higher. Supporters say the state is handing tax revenue to Louisiana, Tennessee, and now Missouri for nothing. Opponents worry about what happens to the casino floor once nobody has to walk onto it to place a bet.
None of that changes what a Saturday looks like for a Mississippi fan. Cheering on the Ole Miss Rebels or the Mississippi State Bulldogs, or following the Clinton Arrows on a Friday night, still means driving to a casino to back your team with a wager. That’s the same routine that’s existed since 2018.
What Comes Next
Missouri didn’t wait around, and neither did the operators lining up for a piece of it. Mississippi has had eight years and multiple tries in the legislature, and it still hasn’t gotten there. At some point that’s not bad luck. That’s a choice.
