Under the umbrella of tensor algebra, this paper proposes a new sparse-coding-based classifier (SCC) for hyperspectral imagery classification (HIC). By utilizing the tensor forms of hyperspectral pixels, we advance a tensor sparse-coding model which preserves as many original spatial constraints of a pixel and its spatial neighbors as possible. Furthermore, to alleviate the classification uncertainty resulted from widely existing mixed pixels, this paper constructs a regularization term for maximizing the likelihood of sparse-coding tensor defined on the posterior class probability. By combining the tensor sparse coding with maximizing likelihood estimation, a hybrid probabilistic SCC with spatial neighbor tensor (HPSCC-SNT) is proposed, which makes the pixels be well represented by the training pixels belonging to the same class. The performance of HPSCC-SNT is evaluated on three real hyperspectral imagery data sets, and the results show that it can achieve accurate and robust HIC results, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.