The contact process is an emblematic model of a nonequilibrium system, containing a phase transition between inactive and active dynamical regimes. In the epidemiological context, the model is known as the susceptible-infected-susceptible model, and it is widely used to describe contagious spreading. In this work, we demonstrate how accurate and efficient representations of the full probability distribution over all configurations of the contact process on a one-dimensional chain can be obtained by means of matrix product states (MPSs). We modify and adapt MPS methods from many-body quantum systems to study the classical distributions of the driven contact process at late times. We give accurate and efficient results for the distribution of large gaps, and illustrate the advantage of our methods over Monte Carlo simulations. Furthermore, we study the large deviation statistics of the dynamical activity, defined as the total number of configuration changes along a trajectory, and investigate quantum-inspired entropic measures, based on the second Rényi entropy.