Figured it out.
I came in this morning and ran a little test. Uninstalling the UL client and installing the classic client returned the toolbar and the protect button in the ribbon. So not only those but the policies are attached to which client you use. I was testing different policy settings between the security center and azure, mainly based around who got certain labels, and now receive labels based on the azure policies when using the classic client.
I hope MS can rectify this in the future. Having 2 different clients that pull 2 different policies based from the same labels that are "shared" between 2 different clouds and having to go to 2 different places to troubleshoot when things go wrong gets ridiculous.