Are you talking about keeping the number you enter, or not having numbers at all in your lists?
If you want numbered list, but preserve the number you enter, I’m not sure if that’s possible at all using Markdown. You could enter a non-number list, and have the number as the first bit of text in that line, but that’s not the same.
Other than that, it’s also possible to change when the number series reset, so that you could get running numbers within a section or a whole page or similar.