In this paper, we describe a study of charged particle yield as a function of p
T
for K
*(892)0 and ϕ (1020) mesons in proton–proton (pp) and Pb–Pb collisions at
s
N
N
= 2.76 TeV in the central rapidity region of ∣y∣ < 0.5, in a p
T
range of 0 < p
T
< 15 GeV c
−1 in pp collisions and in a p
T
range of 0 < p
T
< 20 GeV c
−1 in Pb-Pb collisions. We also investigated a very important ratio, the nuclear modification factor, to study the effects of the medium in the most central region, i.e. 0%–5% centrality. For data simulation, we used the EPOS-LHC and EPOS-1.99 models. To check the validity of these models’ simulations, we compared the data obtained from these Monte Carlo simulation programs with ALICE experimental data for
s
N
N
= 2.76 TeV. It was concluded that the models’ predictions for the ϕ-meson in pp and for the most central Pb-Pb collisions disagreed with the ALICE data, and that the difference increased with p
T
. This may be connected with the essential role of collective parton behaviors which could not have been taken into account by the models. For K
*0 mesons, both programs gave almost the same predictions, and with p
T
in the interval p
T
> 3 GeV c
−1, the predictions were very close to the experimental data. Both models gave higher predictions for the soft p
T
interval and lower predictions for the hard interactions. The values of the R
AA distributions were lower than unity and both models were very close to the ALICE data. It is very interesting that the models were not able to describe the p
T
distributions, but they gave good predictions for their ratios. This may possibly be due to parton collective behaviors. We observed some additional suppression of K
∗0 at low values of p
T
with respect to ϕ-mesons, which may be related to the role of the masses of the particles in soft interactions. The rising trend for R
AA in the region from p
T
= 10 GeV c
−1 to 20 GeV c
−1 observed by the ALICE experiment was absent for the ϕ-mesons.