I'm not sure what you mean, but no, holding off doing ascension won't help nor hurt. The counter will keep counting as you do more Imperial missions. You can theoretically be at Serf but have so many points accumulated behind the scenes that you can rank all the way up to King, but the amount of missions will still be the same whether you take ascension or not.
Some people used to stack ascension missions since they will also give rank % increase. By stacking they can make one run and blow through 50 - 100 missions at a time. I don't believe that's possible now, given the rework of the mission board.