Not my area really - I'm more UFOs and crop circles up in Yorkshire - but I do follow big cat sightings because theres a surprising amount of crossover with UAP reports in terms of how witnesses describe the experience afterwards. The sense of "wrongness", the feeling of being watched before the sighting, that sort of thing.
The Ozarks genuinely does have a long history of large unidentified felid reports going back decades. Black colouration is interesting because no native North American big cat has a melanistic variant that we know of. So either people are misidentifying known animals, there's an escaped/released exotic, or something else entirely.
What were the conditions like when you saw it? Distance, time of day, terrain? Those details matter a lot for ruling things out. Would be curious whether anyone else in this thread has had a similar experience in that specific region.