Efficient data structures can greatly enhance Python code performance by providing different time complexities for various operations. Selecting the optimal data structure can have a significant impact on code speed.

For instance, implementing a queue data structure using a list can be sluggish for larger lists because appending and popping from the beginning of the list can be slow. Instead, using a collections.deque object, which is specially designed to implement queues, can improve performance significantly.

Here’s an example of how the right data structure can improve code performance when searching for the maximum and minimum values of a list of numbers: