Massive Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO) systems offer exciting opportunities due to their high spectral efficiencies capabilities. On the other hand, one major issue in these scenarios is the high-complexity detectors of such systems. In this work, we present a low-complexity, near maximum-likelihood (ML) performance achieving detector for the uplink in large MIMO systems with tens to hundreds of antennas at the base station (BS) and similar number of uplink users. The proposed algorithm is derived from the likelihood-ascent search (LAS) algorithm and it is shown to achieve near ML performance as well as to possess excellent complexity attribute. The presented algorithm, termed as random-list based LAS (RLB-LAS), employs several iterative LAS search procedures whose starting-points are in a list generated by random changes in the matched filter detected vector and chooses the best LAS result. Also, a stop criterion was proposed in order to maintain the algorithm's complexity at low levels. Near-ML performance detection is demonstrated by means of Monte Carlo simulations and it is shown that this performance is achieved with complexity of just O(K^2) per symbol, where K denotes the number of single-antenna uplink users.