since the machine-code for MVC moves up to 256 BYTES, you WOULD need to do a series of MVCs to initialize 20000 bytes. this requires that you maintain a register or two to keep track of how far you've progressed through initialization. 
possibly, you could get MVCL to do it; i've never tried...

MVCL uses 2 sets of even-odd pairs of registers to do the MOVE.

you specify source address, destination address, length of source, length of destination, and FILL character in the registers. the fill-character GOES into the high order byte of (I THINK...) the destination length register (in this case r4)

l r4,=f'20000'
l r6,=f'20000'
la r7,source_field
la r5,dest_field
mvcl r4,r6

since the machine-code for MVC moves up to 256 bytes, you would need to do a series of MVCs to initialize 20000 bytes. this requires that you maintain a register or two to keep track of how far you've progressed through initialization. 
possibly, you could get MVCL to do it; i've never tried...

MVCL uses 2 sets of even-odd pairs of registers to do the move.

you specify source address, destination address, length of source, length of destination, and fill character in the registers. the fill-character goes into the high order byte of (I THINK...) the destination length register (in this case r4)

l r4,=f'20000'
l r6,=f'20000'
la r7,source_field
la r5,dest_field
mvcl r4,r6