The doubly charmed tetraquark $T_{cc}(3875)^+$ observed at LHCb has attracted considerable interest in recent years. To accurately determine its finite-volume spectrum, a variational analysis using a large basis of operators, including bilocal scattering operators, but also local tetraquark operators, should be employed. Using Wilson-clover fermions at the $SU(3)$-flavour-symmetric point, we investigated the importance of local tetraquark operators for the $T_{cc}$ spectrum by adding them to a large basis of bilocal $DD^*$ and $D^*D^*$ scattering operators. We performed this calculation using the distillation framework combined with a position-space sampling method that we recently developed. This method makes local tetraquark operators affordable in distillation. Upon including local tetraquark operators, we observe significant shifts in the estimates of several energy levels. Finally, we show the effect of these shifts on the $DD^*$ scattering phase shifts obtained from a single-channel $s$-wave Lüscher analysis.