In the new version of the Canvas Gradebook, Canvas started automatically adding "Late" and "Missing" labels to student assignments. The only way to turn these off is by-student-by-assignment; you cannot turn off the labels for a specific assignment, and you cannot turn off the labels for an entire course.
For me, these labels are a huge problem. I use a course design where students choose which assignments they want to do (when they don't choose to do an assignment it is NOT "missing"), and I also give them a soft/hard deadline option (as long as they turn something in by the hard deadline, it is NOT "late"). I've written a lot about this problem elsewhere: Canvas and the Botched Gradebook Labels.
Luckily, the API Guru of the Canvas Community, James Jones, has written a javascript that you can use to remove those labels from your Gradebook! You can remove the "missing" labels so that they never show up at all. For the "late" labels, you cannot remove them in advance, but you can remove them after they appear. James has also written up a detailed page explaining how it works: Removing Missing and Late Labels.
James even made a YouTube video to walk you through it:
