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I have a problem with a model I'm working on - I added a component that drives the tri count up way too much. As you can see, these "lights" on the sides are all little cylinders, which means the part itself is super high poly. Is there any way I could do this more efficiently? As of right now the mesh won't show up in-game because it's exceeding 24000 tris, plus that's ridiculous for such a small prop. I appreciate any help.

Make each "group" of lights a simple flat polygonal plane and give its material hard-edged transparency, glow, and emissive flags. The texture's alpha channel should look something like this:

Marth's method will definitely work. Unless you want to keep them three dimensional. It depends on what you're aiming at.
If your mesh "hello" is really 24K tris then first of all you have to split this mesh into multiple ones. Let's say you got 4 sets of these lights (Right view) and three sets from top to bottom (Front view).

With portals and sectors you can split the overall rendering thingy into diverse parts and areas. Anyways when objects begin to flicker you might have to add a _lowrez mesh to "hello". But I think it's more professional to keep the game's performance low in lowering the poly count or by making 2d shapes (What Marth already said).

Alternatively you can also delete the unused polygons from the lights. The opposite side of the white cylinders are solid. Still you can save up to many tris by deleting them.

Marth's method worked perfectly. I originally had the lights be a mesh because I wanted only their texture to have glow (vs wall behind), but I totally forgot about hardedged transparency. I also forgot that I named the lights "hello" lol. Definitely preferable to use the texture method, because performance-wise I was really cringing at having such a complex mesh do such a simple thing. Thanks for the help everyone!