Despite this question Where ".gvfs" has gone in 14.04 , the folder I found in /run/user/1000/gvfs is empty, but I have 3 mounted samba shares.
Even locate .gvfs gives no results and all locate gvfs results don't have any of the mounted samba shares inside.
I had the same problem and VLC wouldn't play videos from a smb mount. To solve this I installed gvfs-fuse - which was not installed by default.
sudo apt-get install gvfs-fuse
/run/user/1000/gvfs will contain your samba mounts after you install gvfs-fuse. You will need to reboot after installing.
I added a bug report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate/+bug/1456803
