In MIPS, there are only two types of instructions for controlling program flow, branches and jumps. As a MIPS program executes, the instructions are run sequentially from top to bottom and will only stop once they reach the end or encounter a branch or jump.
Labels allow us to assign a human-readable name to a particular place in code. Labels point to a specific line of code, they do not encapsulate code in any way from the code surrounding it. Take this example:
LOOP: slt $t0, $t1, $t2