/var/lib/mysql folder is missing

It's likely that you need to install the mysql-server package.

yum install mysql-server

You can search for packages by name with some of the following yum commands:

# list all packages starting with "mysql"
yum list mysql\*

# search package names/summaries/descriptions for "mysql"
yum search mysql

The packages which you did install likely provided only the client and client libraries, which you could use to connect to a mysql server located on another host.