SQL Server - is there a way to convert OR conditions to UNION to improve performance (as part of execution plan, under the hood)?

Question

Let's assume we have following query (greatly simplified, of course):

SELECT * FROM MyTable
Where A or B

The query takes about 30 seconds to run

When I rewrite the query as

SELECT DISTINCT * FROM 
(
    SELECT * FROM MyTable Where A
    UNION ALL 
    SELECT * FROM MyTable Where B
) q

then I get results in about 4 seconds. I have seen the same pattern multiple times in the past - replacing OR with UNION improves performance a lot

Question: is there a way to make SQL Server to convert all those OR conditions to UNION internally, while preparing execution plan?

I was trying to find a query hint but no luck so far. We are using SQL Server 2016 SP2