Yes, encrypt entire drive with Bitlocker should be between as secure as doing a dd with /dev/zero and /dev/urandom. (using /dev/urandom is theoretically a little more secure then /dev/zero, but not a practical concern here).
Like with dd, the parts of the disk that are overprovisioned won't be wiped/encrypted initially - so there may be fragments that can be read unless/until those are overwritten.
The important part is the "encrypt entire drive" which will encrypt everything.
Doing a standard luksformat /dev/devname will not encrypt the entire drive. (I just tried this). You would want to "zero out" the empty space on the mounted drive after formatting it.
For that matter, if you did not encrypt the entire partition it would likely be better to dd /dev/zero to a file on the encrypted drive and then delete that file (even under bitlocker) - so that the underlying disk is filled with randomish data, rather then straight zero's.