@laurent1979 Well, your query doesn't make much sense. How is it supposed to count something that isn't aggregated? You just need to do what the error suggests:
$query = 'SELECT count(date) AS total, substr(date, 1, 4) AS annee FROM sort_orders_by_times WHERE date LIKE \'' . $date .'%\' group by annee';
return DB::select($query);