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Recent works have shown that diffusion models can learn essentially any distribution provided one can perform score estimation. Yet it remains poorly understood under what settings score estimation is possible, let alone when practical gradient-based algorithms for this task can provably succeed. In this work, we give the first provably efficient results along these lines for one of the most fundamental distribution families, Gaussian mixture models. We prove that gradient descent on the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) objective can efficiently recover the ground truth parameters of the mixture model in the following two settings: 1) We show gradient descent with random initialization learns mixtures of two spherical Gaussians in d dimensions with 1/poly(d)-separated centers. 2) We show gradient descent with a warm start learns mixtures of K spherical Gaussians with Ω(log(min(K,d)))-separated centers. A key ingredient in our proofs is a new connection between score-based methods and two other approaches to distribution learning, the EM algorithm and spectral methods