You can set the knitr option knitr.kable.na = '' '' for blanks, or whatever character you want.
```{r echo=FALSE, results='asis'} options(knitr.kable.NA = '') knitr::kable(lowerTri, digits=2)```
The trick I use is a bit brute-force, but it appears to work (in my use-cases, that is):
out <- knitr::kable(...)cat(gsub('\\bNA\\b', ' ', out), sep='\n')