Comparing with that of terrestrial networks, the location management in satellite networks is mainly restricted by three factors, i.e., the limited on-board processing (OBP), insufficient link resources and long propagation delay. Under these restrictions, the limited OBP can be smoothened by terrestrial gateway-based location management, the constraint from link resources demands the bandwidth-efficient management scheme and long propagation delay potentially lowers the management efficiency. Currently, the reduction of the management cost has always been the main direction in existing work which is based on the centralized management architecture. This centralized management has many defects, such as the non-optimal routing, scalability problem and single point of failure. To address these problems, this paper explores gateway-based distributed location management schemes for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks. Three management schemes based on terrestrial gateways are proposed and analyzed: loose location management, precise location management, and the grouping location management. The analyses specifically analyze the cost of location queries and show their significant influence on the total cost which includes the location management and query. Starting from the above analysis, we speculate and prove the existence of the optimum scheme in grouping location management, which has the lowest total cost for the query frequency within given range. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis on the cost and show the feature of latency in location queries, which provide a valuable insight into the design of the distributed location management scheme in satellite networks.