LR is quite a good front-end for preparing photos for stitch - also, the 10,000px dimension limit of early versions has since been lifted, so even large panos can be further processed in LR. However, as ssprengel says, the stitching itself must be subcontracted out.
With a compatible version of Photoshop installed, when you highlight a group of images., LR gives you an Edit in / "Merge to Panorama in PS" option on the right-click context menu. This returns the finished item back to LR automatically for further adjustment and usage, and since all the intermediate images that LR needs to make have occurred in memory only, there is nothing to clean up afterwards.
With other stitchers, I have found the process can be at least partially automated, by setting up a LR Export preset (to disk), with the post-processing option pointing to the executable file for the stitch program you want to use, and all the file options set suitably.
I normally work in PTGui Pro for this, however I yesterday tried setting this up for the free (and very effective) Microsoft ICE and that works like a charm too. Doing it this way, the intermediate images have to occur as actual files on disk, which one probably wants to delete afterwards. I find this is made easier and safer by the preset pointing always to a separate "pano" working folder, rather than mingling my temp files in with my permanent files. This leaves the tasks of moving (or navigating at save time) the output file into the same folder as the original images, and stacking those (with the stitched image at the top) after the output has been imported back into LR.