What dos drivers did you use? The standard one are bit tricky to configure. He has there also audigy drivers on the site. It includes also dos drivers. And it makes a full install that you normally dont have to edit anything.

I had varying degrees of success in running my Sound Blaster Live! 1024 Value under DOS back in late 2000 when I bought it with a Celeron 566 MHz.
My installation CD did come with the DOS drivers but, the installation CD's were specific to the model numbers for those cards.

If you can, I would suggest just running your DOS games directly from a Windows 98 command prompt. I presume your hardware is something like a Pentium II or Pentium III?
That way, you don't have to worry too much about DOS tsr's, mouse drivers, etc. and you then also have access to a larger range of soundfonts that can you load into memory (under DOS, you're limited to the Ensoniq derived *.ecw wavesets and also no proper Adlib support).

If you do wish to go the DOS route:
If memory serves, under DOS, in your Autoexec.bat file, you need to load a tsr called SBEINIT.COM.
There is also a CTSYN.INI file which holds the configuration settings and you need to also insert a "SET CTSYN=C:\SB16" environment variable in your Autoexec.bat file to point where the configuration file is stored..
By default, the settings will follow the same as the Windows settings but, there are utilities that comes with the DOS drivers that allows you to change this.
Best would be to try and obtain the correct driver CD for your card (with the DOS drivers) in order to install those correctly on your system.

Use the audigy driver from phils page. It shall work with most live cards also for windows. I had also issues before with the audigy it worked easily. But the installation for dos drivers require the vxd drivers for SB

just pop in the sb live 5.1 installation CD (not applications CD) and install. It should be part of the process, along with AudioHQ, Playcenter(eww), the annoying EAX video, the focus-stealing laluncher, etc.

Sometimes the SB16 Emulation & DOS drivers doesn't install when the CD installs WDM drivers even if you select them as an option during install. If that happens copy the driver CD to your hard drive, edit audio.ini under Audio/English/Setup, and set WDM to 0 and reinstall. You probably want the VXD drivers anyway for games.

AUDIO.INI (excerpt)

1[Drivers]
298SEWDM = 0
3MEWDM   = 0

I just checked Live 5.1's install CD on 98SE. It's happily in C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\SBLIVE\DOSDRV

Sounds like you're starting from absolute scratch OP, so maybe start here: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-mode-super-easy.html

You'll still need to install your DOS sound drivers, but it'll set up the basics and give you a nice PIF to click.