How to count unique days in a list of dates?

I have a list of dates like below and want to get the values of number of days by year. So in the example below it would be 2025 = 2 (10/09 and 09/28) and 2026 = 5 -- I don't want a pivot table but I did try

=COUNTIFS(C16:C988,">="&DATE(2024,1,1),C16:C988,"<"&DATE(2025,1,1))

which would give me a total by year (in this case 2024. But that doesn't get the unique days. Excel for Mac is the software Thanks for any help.

https://preview.redd.it/ulv6qcql3vwg1.png?width=75&format=png&auto=webp&s=bf2d69f7b5cfae14f09afb49b1f24c25a1b9c2b6