Basic bittorrent outline:
You download a .torrent file which contains (amongst other things) a list of files, their hashes, and a list of trackers to connect to.
Your BitTorrent client connects to the tracker and says "Hi, who else has or is looking for these files"?
It returns a list of these people (aka "peers") and your BitTorrent client then connects directly to peers to download the files (and upload them to other people).
Hopefully from this explanation you can see that you need it for two purposes, one so you can give the right infohash to the tracker, and two so you can verify the data you receive from peers.