Overlapping y-axis tick label and x-axis tick label in matplotlib

In the ticker module there is a class called MaxNLocator that can take a prune kwarg.
Using that you can remove the first tick:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.ticker import MaxNLocator
import numpy as np
xx = np.arange(0,5, .5)
yy = np.random.random( len(xx) )
plt.plot(xx,yy)
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_locator(MaxNLocator(prune="lower"))
plt.show()

Result: