The next step will reduce the learning rate, if the loss hasn’t improved.
The patience is used to ignore these iterations and will lower the learning rate in the next step.
From the docs:

Number of epochs with no improvement after which learning rate will be reduced. For example, if patience = 2, then we will ignore the first 2 epochs with no improvement, and will only decrease the LR after the 3rd epoch if the loss still hasn’t improved then.