The work identifies the first general, explicit, and non-random MIMO encoder-decoder structures that guarantee optimality with respect to the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT), without employing a computationally expensive maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver. Specifically, the work establishes the DMT optimality of a class of regularized lattice decoders, and more importantly the DMT optimality of their lattice-reduction (LR)-aided linear counterparts. The results hold for all channel statistics, for all channel dimensions, and most interestingly, irrespective of the particular lattice-code applied. As a special case, it is established that the LLL-based LRaided linear implementation of the MMSE-GDFE lattice decoder facilitates DMT optimal decoding of any lattice code at a worstcase complexity that grows at most linearly in the data rate. This represents a fundamental reduction in the decoding complexity when compared to ML decoding whose complexity is generally exponential in rate. T...