Consider the possibility that the backup disk contains a backup set for what it may consider a different Mac.
"Different" in that sense could be the same Mac but with a startup disk that was renamed at some point. In that hypothetical situation that set of backups becomes segregated and its older backups never deleted.
In that event the fix is as Barney-15E wrote: erase the disk and start over. For that reason and others, one and only one backup disk does not comprise an effective backup strategy. Time Machine will back up to as many backup disks as you wish to provide.