KOAM-TV first signed on at 5:22 p.m. on December 13, 1953, under the ownership of MidContinent Broadcasting Company, a joint venture of The Joplin Globe newspaper and E. Victor Baxter and Lester E. Cox, owners of KOAM radio (860 AM, the current KKOW), with Baxter and Cox holding a controlling interest.

Mid-Continent Broadcasting sold the station to Draper Communications, who also owned WBOC-TV in Salisbury, Maryland, in 1984.

KOAM's digital signal on channel 13 signed on in 2001 and remained until KOAM turned off its analog signal at 12:38 a.m. on February 17, 2009 (the original date on which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate, which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009), following The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, at which time KOAM ceased analog broadcasting and its digital broadcast returned to channel 7.

Sister station KFJX, the market's Fox affiliate, moved onto KOAM's former digital channel 13 (KFJX continued to broadcast on analog channel 14 until May 2009 when a line of severe thunderstorms damaged the broadcast tower, forcing the removal of the antenna).

In 2024, KOAM parent company Morgan Murphy Media reached an agreement to broadcast eight Oklahoma City Thunder games.