Carriage returns in list

I’m trying to add a carriage return in between list items but WP is re-writing my entry and either eliminating it if it’s a soft return (SHIFT+RETURN) in HTML or breaking the list into two if I place a <br /> after </li>

The issue here is that the theme lists items side by side and I need to have them in a traditional list format. I could modify the theme but I’d like to avoid doing that.