Let $γ\in (0,2)$ and let $h$ be the random distribution on $\mathbb C$ which describes a $γ$-Liouville quantum gravity (LQG) cone. Also let $κ= 16/γ^2 >4$ and let $η$ be a whole-plane space-filling SLE$_κ$ curve sampled independent from $h$ and parametrized by $γ$-quantum mass with respect to $h$. We study a family $\{\mathcal G^ε\}_{ε>0}$ of planar maps associated with $(h, η)$ called the \textit{LQG structure graphs} (a.k.a.\ \textit{mated-CRT maps}) which we conjecture converge in probability in the scaling limit with respect to the Gromov-Hausdorff topology to a random metric space associated with $γ$-LQG. In particular, $\mathcal G^ε$ is the graph whose vertex set is $ε\mathbb Z$, with two such vertices $x_1,x_2\in ε\mathbb Z$ connected by an edge if and only if the corresponding curve segments $η([x_1-ε, x_1])$ and $η([x_2-ε,x_2])$ share a non-trivial boundary arc. Due to the peanosphere description of SLE-decorated LQG due to Duplantier, Miller, and Sheffield (2014), the graph $\mathcal G^ε$ can equivalently be expressed as an explicit functional of a correlated two-dimensional Brownian motion, so can be studied without any reference to SLE or LQG. We prove non-trivial upper and lower bounds for the cardinality of a graph-distance ball of radius $n$ in $\mathcal G^ε$ which are consistent with the prediction of Watabiki (1993) for the Hausdorff dimension of LQG. Using subadditivity arguments, we also prove that there is an exponent $χ> 0$ for which the expected graph distance between generic points in the subgraph of $\mathcal G^ε$ corresponding to the segment $η([0,1])$ is of order $ε^{-χ+ o_ε(1)}$, and this distance is extremely unlikely to be larger than $ε^{-χ+ o_ε(1)}$.