Can I bring up past work in the discussion?
I recently went through this for a paper of mine where we had a lot of different findings that we wanted to relate to many different prior results. It helped me to think of the paper in linear order (i.e., our Background section came before our Results so we didn't bring them up there)

We setup the Background to discuss relevant ideas that we bring up later but don't mention our results at all. We then present the results, as-is. Then in the Discussion, we tie our findings back to the literature.