Perhaps these tables have lots of hand-crafted changes done with DBMS_STATS.SET_xxx_STATS procedures.
Perhaps gathering is a time-consuming activity that you know isn’t necessary or will not be necessary for some time.
Perhaps you have restored statistics and you know that re-gathering will cause problems.
Perhaps the statistics for a small but growing table have been imported from a test system and reflect future large volumes and you want to make sure that these imported
statistics are not overwritten by statistics that reflect the current low row count