Summary: We develop entropy dissipative higher order accurate local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) discretizations coupled with Diagonally Implicit Runge-Kutta (DIRK) methods for nonlinear degenerate parabolic equations with a gradient flow structure. Using the simple alternating numerical flux, we construct DIRK-LDG discretizations that combine the advantages of higher order accuracy, entropy dissipation and proper long-time behavior. We theoretically prove the entropy dissipation of the implicit Euler-LDG discretization without any time-step restrictions when no positivity constraint is imposed. Next, in order to ensure the positivity of the numerical solution, we use the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) limiter, which achieves a positive solution by coupling the positivity preserving KKT conditions with higher order accurate DIRK-LDG discretizations using Lagrange multipliers. In addition, mass conservation of the positivity-limited solution is ensured by imposing a mass conservation equality constraint to the KKT equations. Under a time step restriction, the unique solvability and entropy dissipation for implicit first order accurate in time, but higher order accurate in space, positivity-preserving LDG discretizations with periodic boundary conditions are proved, which provide a first theoretical analysis of the KKT limiter. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the higher order accuracy and entropy dissipation of the positivity-preserving DIRK-LDG discretizations for problems requiring a positivity limiter. In addition, we can observe from the numerical results that the implicit time-discrete methods alleviate the time-step restrictions needed for the stability of the numerical discretizations, which improves computational efficiency.