SQL - Injection on Purpose in ASP.NET Core 2.1.7

I'm a college student and I'm in a class about computer security. I have a final project that I had to come up with so I decided to do a project where I create my own website and run a DoS attack and SQL Injection (I will also be doing a buffer overflow attack on my own VM). So I am creating a website using ASP.NET using Visual Studio 2019. I have not really worked with ASP.NET and I'm just trying to make a basic website. So far I have a webpage where you can view "Customers" and you can search for one. So I am creating this code so that I can SQL Inject and I understand the correct way to implement this. Here is my code so far

This a model class where my actual vulnerable SQL Command is being run

using MySql.Data.MySqlClient;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace bullAndTrue.Models
{
    public class CustomerContext
    {
        public string ConnectionString { get; set; }

        public CustomerContext(string connectionString)
        {
            this.ConnectionString = connectionString;
        }

        private MySqlConnection GetConnection()
        {
            return new MySqlConnection(ConnectionString);
        }

        public List<Customer> GetCustomers(string name)
        {
            List<Customer> customerList = new List<Customer>();

            using(MySqlConnection conn = GetConnection())
            {
                conn.Open();
                MySqlCommand myCmd = new MySqlCommand("SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE firstName LIKE '%" + name + "%'", conn);

                using(var reader= myCmd.ExecuteReader())
                {
                    while(reader.Read())
                    {
                        customerList.Add(new Customer()
                        {
                            idCustomers = Convert.ToInt32(reader["idCustomers"]),
                            firstName = reader["firstName"].ToString(),
                            lastName = reader["lastName"].ToString(),
                            address = reader["address"].ToString()
                        }); 
                    }
                }
            }

            return customerList;
        }
    }
}

Here we can see my command

SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE firstName LIKE '%userInput%' 

is the vulnerable part. Here I should be able to input ';-- and get the list of all customers. Instead of getting a list of all customers I get an error instead (Which is awesome that there are security options but that's the whole point of this project is to skip security!)

Error:

MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlException: 'You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '--%'' at line 1'

I have been trying to figure out how to bypass this error and get the query I need. I have been trying to use different versions of dependencies but I can't figure out what is blocking me from doing the injection. Here are a list of my relative dependencies:

• MySql.Data Version= 8.0.22
• Microsoft.AspNetCore Version= 2.1.7

My server is running on an AWS instance and its running MySQL version 5.5 (Lowest I could go; Maybe this is the problem?)

This is my first time posting so hopefully I'm doing it right. If you need more information I will be happy to post it. Any help is appreciated!