The version provided via EPEL is unfortunately to old. Have you considered upgrading to CentOS 8? In case this is not possible, you can always compile from source. Here some older notes of mine for version 2.4.0:
sudo yum-builddep gdal
wget http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/2.4.0/gdal-2.4.0.tar.gz
tar xf gdal-2.4.0.tar.gz
cd gdal-2.4.0/
./configure
make -j4
sudo make install
# make sure the library can be found
echo /usr/local/lib | sudo tee -a /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf
sudo ldconfig
It might be possible to avoid the final steps by setting suitable options for configure.