The application of high-dimensional quantum systems (qudits) in quantum computing and communications seems to be a promising avenue due to the possibility of increasing the amount of information encoded in one physical carrier. In this work, we propose a method for implementing single-qudit gates for qudits based on light modes with orbital angular momentum (OAM). Method for logical qudits encoding, which ensures the quasi-cyclicity of operations, is introduced. Based on the protocol for converting the OAM of light in the Raman quantum memory scheme (Vashukevich et al 2020 Phys. Rev. A 101 033830), we show that the considered gates provide an extremely high level of fidelity of single-qudit transformations. We also compare quantum gates' properties for systems of different dimensions and find the optimal conditions for carrying out transformations in the protocol under consideration