Optimizing the size and depth of CNOT circuits is an active area of research in quantum computing and is particularly relevant for circuits synthesized from the Clifford + T universal gate set. Although many techniques exist for finding short syntheses, it is difficult to assess how close to optimal these syntheses are without an exponential brute-force search. We use a novel method of categorizing CNOT gates in a synthesis to obtain a strict lower bound computable in $O(n^ω)$ time on the minimum number of gates needed to synthesize a given CNOT circuit, where $ω$ denotes the matrix multiplication constant and $n$ is the number of qubits involved. Applying our framework, we prove that $3(n-1)$ gate syntheses of the $n$-cycle circuit are optimal and provide insight into their structure. We also generalize this result to permutation circuits. For linear reversible circuits with $ n = 3, 4, 5$ qubits, our lower bound is optimal for 100%, 67.7%, and 23.1% of circuits and is accurate to within one CNOT gate in 100%, 99.5%, and 83.0% of circuits respectively. We also introduce an algorithm that efficiently determines whether certain circuits can be synthesized with fewer than $n$ CNOT gates.