If you're just looking to glue triangles together along their edges, you can do it with two triangles, glued together to form a square, and then with opposite sides of the square glued to form a torus in the usual way. The resulting mesh has one vertex and three edges.
But if the triangles have to meet edge-to-edge and vertex-to-vertex form a simplicial complex (meaning that the intersection of any two triangles is empty, a single vertex, or an edge) then I think the smallest mesh for a torus has 14 triangles, connected to each other in the pattern of the Heawood graph. The resulting mesh has seven vertices and 21 edges. It can be embedded into space as the Császár polyhedron.
