Contacts lost following Max storage space

I lost the contacts on my phone. These were not backed up on iCloud. Nonetheless I toggled the contacts in the iCloud and it synced a very old list of my contacts when I did back it up on iCloud. However, when I go to try to send a picture and search a name in the search bar (even a newer name that is not in the old list of contacts), the contact comes up. I just can’t see them in my contact list and in my messages anymore. Any ideas of how I could fix this issue? Not sure if relevant but my iPhone also ran out of space recently and it seems to have coincided with the loss of these contacts.