How to build gradle project before creating a distribution?

Question

I have a gradle 6.x project, where I use the distribution plugin to create .zip distribution. https://docs.gradle.org/6.9/userguide/distribution_plugin.html

I use the following command to create a ZIP dist:

gradle distZip

However, I have some jar files that I need to put inside a distribution, and when only running this command, it creates a basically empty zip file, because these jars would be located at /build/... .

How can I tell the distZip task, to build these jars before packaging, preferably without running tests?

Thanks!