It's because of how LJ formats HTML. All the line breaks you code into the table outside of your <tr> and <td> tags, it doesn't know how to deal with properly, so it shoves them outside of the table — giving you that gap.
There's only two ways to fix it, that I know of: either delete all of said spacing line breaks between your closing and opening tags in your table* (thus making the whole thing really condensed and hard to read), or hard code in all the line breaks you want visible (<br> and <p>), including in the post outside the table, and check the "Disable Auto Formatting" box on the post entry/post comment with more options pages.
*: that have to do with table section division. You'd leave your line breaks where they are in the body text of the table
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There's only two ways to fix it, that I know of: either delete all of said spacing line breaks between your closing and opening tags in your table* (thus making the whole thing really condensed and hard to read), or hard code in all the line breaks you want visible (<br> and <p>), including in the post outside the table, and check the "Disable Auto Formatting" box on the post entry/post comment with more options pages.
*: that have to do with table section division. You'd leave your line breaks where they are in the body text of the table