The 2018 Miss Missouri USA competition is the pageant that selects the representative for the state Missouri in the Miss USA pageant. In 1993, Missouri joined the Vanbros group of state pageants for the Miss USA and Teen USA system.
Missouri has had only one Miss USA, Shandi Finnessey, who placed as 1st runner-up to Jennifer Hawkins of Australia in the Miss Universe 2004 pageant.
Three Miss Missouri USAs have competed at Miss America, including Finnessey who is one of only two Miss USA winners since 1980 to win the Miss USA title. Six former Miss Teen USA delegates have also won the title, equalling Indiana and Virginia for the most crossovers, although both Indiana and Missouri have had titleholders who competed in a different state at Miss Teen USA.
Every year, each state holds a preliminary competition to choose their delegate for the Miss USA pageant. In some states (such as Texas and Florida), local pageants are also held to determine delegates for the state competition. The state winners hold the title "Miss State USA" for the year of their reign.
The most successful state is Texas, which has had the most semi-finalists and winners, including five consecutive Miss USA titleholders during the 1980s.[22] Other successful states include California, New York, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia. The least successful states are Delaware, placing only once in 2015; Montana, which has not placed since the 1950s; South Dakota, which has only placed three times (the last time in 2016), and Wyoming, which gained only its second placement in 2010. The only state which has produced more than one Miss Universe is South Carolina.
The Miss Universe Organization licenses out the state pageants to pageant directors, who in some cases are responsible for more than one state. The most well established directorial groups are RPM Productions, created in 1980 (Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina), and Vanbros, created in the early 1990s (Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma). Future Productions direct the most states, seven, across the Midwest and Rockies.