diff --git a/ci/test_wheel_cugraph-dgl.sh b/ci/test_wheel_cugraph-dgl.sh
index 827ad487115..564b46cb07e 100755
--- a/ci/test_wheel_cugraph-dgl.sh
+++ b/ci/test_wheel_cugraph-dgl.sh
@@ -32,8 +32,18 @@ fi
 PYTORCH_URL="https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu${PYTORCH_CUDA_VER}"
 DGL_URL="https://data.dgl.ai/wheels/cu${PYTORCH_CUDA_VER}/repo.html"
 
+# Starting from 2.2, PyTorch wheels depend on nvidia-nccl-cuxx>=2.19 wheel and
+# dynamically link to NCCL. RAPIDS CUDA 11 CI images have an older NCCL version that
+# might shadow the newer NCCL required by PyTorch during import (when importing
+# `cupy` before `torch`).
+if [[ "${NCCL_VERSION}" < "2.19" ]]; then
+  PYTORCH_VER="2.1.0"
+else
+  PYTORCH_VER="2.3.0"
+fi
+
 rapids-logger "Installing PyTorch and DGL"
-rapids-retry python -m pip install torch --index-url ${PYTORCH_URL}
+rapids-retry python -m pip install "torch==${PYTORCH_VER}" --index-url ${PYTORCH_URL}
 rapids-retry python -m pip install dgl==2.0.0 --find-links ${DGL_URL}
 
 python -m pytest python/cugraph-dgl/tests