Mockery doesn't seem to recognize nested method call

After much looking around on Stack and searching around for the past 2 hours, I'm completely lost. None of the questions I find describe my issue in the slightest.

These questions include these:
PHPUnit mocked method called 0 times while it should be called once
PHP Mockery not calling mocked method from within mock
Laravel 4 Mocking Issue : should be called exactly 1 times but called 0 times

I'm working on a project that must reserve IP addresses with a given network. When a network is created, all IP addresses within the given range must also be created. For this I'm using a repository.

To test if the implementation works as expected, I'm mocking the instances, which are the injected into my controller.

During the tests, 2 methods of the repository are called. The relevant methods are shown below:

/**
 * Create a new IP Address
 *
 * @param array $properties
 * @return IP
 */
public function create(array $properties)
{
    return IP::create($properties);
}

/**
 * Create an IP range
 *
 * @param array $range
 * @param array $baseProperties
 * @throws DuplicateIPException
 */
public function createRange(array $range, array $baseProperties)
{
    $properties = [];

    try {
        foreach ($range as $ip) {
            $properties = array_merge($baseProperties, [ 'ip' => $ip ]);

            $this->create($properties);
        }
    } catch (\PDOException $e) {
        throw new DuplicateIPException($properties['ip']);
    }
}

These methods are mocked like so:

$IPRepoMock = $this->mock(IIPRepository::class);
$IPRepoMock->shouldReceive('createRange')->once();
$IPRepoMock->shouldReceive('create')->times(256);

And the controller method that's being tested is the following:

public function store(NetworkFormRequest $formRequest, IPRangeCreator $rangeCreator)
{
    $redirect = redirect('/network');

    try {
        $network = $this->networkRepo->create($formRequest->all());

        $range = $rangeCreator->createRange($network->networkaddress, $network->netmaskbits);

        $this->IPRepo->createRange($range, [
            'network' => $network->network,
            'zone' => null,
        ]);

        $redirect->with('success', 'Network has been created.');


    } catch (DuplicateIPException $e) {
        $redirect->withErrors([ 'ip_overlap' => $e->getMessage() ]);
    }

    return $redirect;
}

The expected result is that the test would pass without any issues. This is not the case however, as I'm getting the following error:

Method create() from Mockery_1_IIPRepository should be called exactly 256 times but called 0 times.

This is what I find strange, considering that, during this test, the create() method is called exactly 256 times. (I figured this out because it actually inserted the data once by accident due to a wrong setup)