This study is concerned with coded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) visible light communication (VLC) system, where unipolar M-level pulse amplitude modulation is assumed along with MIMO transmission techniques, including repetition coding, spatial multiplexing and spatial modulation. In order to evaluate the performance of MIMO-VLC system, the authors analyse the mutual information of the MIMO techniques, based on which the block Markov superposition transmission (BMST) codes are constructed to improve the bit-error rate (BER) performance of the system. In addition, they present a genie-aided lower bound to predict the performance of the BMST-VLC system in the low-BER region. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve significant coding gain compared with Reed-Solomon-coded MIMO-VLC system adopted in IEEE standard 802.15.7.