Conan O’Brien isn’t letting sleeping dogs — or bears — lie when “Conan” begins on TBS next month.

The late-night host says that he won’t let potential NBC intellectual property rights lawsuits dictate what he does on his new talk show.

“If there’s something we did for a long time that we’ve established as ours, we’ll figure out a way to do it,” O’Brien told Rolling Stone in its Nov. 11 issue. “I won’t be denied my Masturbating Bear!”

He is, of course, referring to the “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” gag where a bear wearing a loincloth — actually a man in a costume — walked on stage and then pleasured itself to the strains of Aram Khachaturian’s famous “Sabre Dance.” It’s one of many characters and comedy bits that frequently appeared on “Late Night.”

“What I really wanna do,” O’Brien confided, “is be sued over the bear and then appear in court with the Masturbating Bear. ‘Your Honor, this bear can’t help himself!’ ”

The red-haired comedian also commented on being ousted from his “Tonight Show” hosting gig after a scant seven months to make room for a returning Jay Leno. (O’Brien signed a deal worth a reported $45 million to part ways with NBC in January.)

“Knowing what I know, I’m quite confident that what happened really didn’t have much at all to do with what I was doing,” O’Brien said.

“That’s not to say that my show was perfect . . . But given the situation, I don’t think, even if I had done a radically different show, anything would have been different.”

While other late-night hosts lampooned Leno during their monologues at the time, O’Brien said that he reeled himself in.

“If you look at the tapes, I probably made three jokes about him,” O’Brien said, “Which I think I was entitled to do. But I was very careful not to go to town.”

Still, the tumultuous two-week period made him “feel like, ‘OK, I’m going to go for broke. I have got nothing to lose.’ Let’s face it: I’m not going to do another television show after this one.”

But two and a half months after his final “Tonight” episode aired, he announced that he would be hosting a new TBS late night show set to premiere on Nov. 8.

Looking back, “There were times when I’ve told myself, ‘Maybe I could have gone on and done ‘The Tonight Show’ for 15 years, but never had the impact that I had doing those last six shows,’ ” O’Brien said. “So maybe that moment’s a gift.”