  We report a correlation between the presence of a Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus
(GSE) analogue and dark matter halo spin in the ARTEMIS simulations of Milky
Way-like galaxies. The haloes which contain a large population of accreted
stars on highly radial orbits (like the GSE) have lower spin on average than
their counterparts with more isotropic stellar velocity distributions. The
median modified spin parameters $\lambda^\prime$ differ by a factor of
$\sim1.7$ at the present-day, with a similar value when the haloes far from
virial equilibrium are removed. We also show that accreted stars make up a
smaller proportion of the stellar populations in haloes containing a GSE
analogue, and are stripped from satellites with stellar masses typically
$\sim4$ times smaller. Our findings suggest that the higher spin of DM haloes
without a GSE-like feature is due to mergers with large satellites of stellar
mass $\sim10^{10}M_\odot$, which do not result in prominent radially
anisotropic features like the GSE.
