I know the primary data structure in Lua is called a table, but I’m not very familiar with them and if they map to what’s expected from tables in data science.

Lua's tables are associative arrays, at least fundamentally. There's more to it than that, but it's not the same as the tables/data frames people are using with pandas and similar systems. You could build that kind of framework on top of Lua's tables, though.

https://www.lua.org/pil/2.5.html

IIRC those are basically hash tables, which are first-class citizens in many languages already