Getting the most recent message in a thread

I have a query that gets all the info I need for a messaging system's main page (including unread message count, etc)... but it currently retrieves the original threads message. I would like to augment the below query to grab the most recent message in each thread instead.

This query is very close, however my mediocre SQL skills are keeping me from wrapping things up...

$messages = array();
$unread_messages_total = 0;

$messages_query = "
SELECT m.*
    , COUNT(r.id) AS num_replies
    , MAX(r.datetime) AS reply_datetime
    , (m.archived NOT LIKE '%,".$cms_user['id'].",%') AS message_archive
    , (m.viewed LIKE '%,".$cms_user['id'].",%') AS message_viewed 
    , SUM(r.viewed NOT LIKE '%,".$cms_user['id'].",%') AS unread_replies 
    , CASE
        WHEN MAX(r.datetime) >= m.datetime THEN MAX(r.datetime)
        ELSE m.datetime
        END AS last_datetime
FROM directus_messages AS m
LEFT JOIN directus_messages as r ON m.id = r.reply
WHERE m.active = '1'  
AND (m.to LIKE '%,".$cms_user['id'].",%' OR m.to = 'all' OR m.from = '".$cms_user['id']."') 
GROUP BY m.id
HAVING m.reply = '0' 
ORDER BY last_datetime DESC";

foreach($dbh->query($messages_query) as $row_messages){
    $messages[] = $row_messages;
    $unread_messages_total += (strpos($row_messages['archived'], ','.$cms_user['id'].',') === false && ( (strpos($row_messages['viewed'], ','.$cms_user['id'].',') === false && $row_messages['unread_replies'] == NULL) || ($row_messages['unread_replies']>0 && $row_messages['unread_replies'] != NULL) ) )? 1 : 0;
}

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

EDIT: (Database)

CREATE TABLE `cms_messages` (
  `id` int(10) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `active` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '1',
  `subject` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
  `message` text NOT NULL,
  `datetime` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
  `reply` int(10)