I just put together the MP Maker Select v2. It took me a while to level it but now I think it is level and finally got a successful PLA print...well somewhat.

Before the printer got to the very first spot of the print, which was a butterfly supplied by the printer to test, filament already started coming out and that spot got a little messy, the rest of the print was good.

How do I avoid this?

I've seen some prints on youtube start by putting a single line outside the print area, I assume this is to take care of this but I am not sure and wanted to make sure.

Just set one or two line skirt few mm apart from the part in the slicer, once printer the code generated will retract before it moves to the actual part, any mess will stay away from the part.