Splitting a partition

Encountered a strange setup wherein a table was created as partitioned but only with a max partition resulting in basically a single partition table. Extract of the ORIGINAL DDL was as follows:

  CREATE TABLE “SCHEMA”.”TABLE_NAME” 
   (	"VERSION_NUM" VARCHAR2(5 BYTE), 
       .
       .
       .    
	"PARTITION_COLUMN" DATE, 
	.
      .
 (PARTITION "PARTITION_MAX" 
  TABLESPACE "DE_SUSP_IND_001" )  ENABLE
   ) PCTFREE 10 PCTUSED 40 INITRANS 1 MAXTRANS 255 
  STORAGE(
  BUFFER_POOL DEFAULT FLASH_CACHE DEFAULT CELL_FLASH_CACHE DEFAULT)
  TABLESPACE "TABLE_DAT_001" 
  PARTITION BY RANGE ("PARTITION_COLUMN") 
 (PARTITION "PARTITION_MAX"  VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE) SEGMENT CREATION IMMEDIATE
  ENABLE ROW MOVEMENT ;

I needed to split this into two partitions such that all ros with a value less than 2017-11-12 in a separate partition. I split the partitions as shown:

ALTER TABLE “SCHEMA”.”TABLE_NAME” 
      SPLIT PARTITION "PARTITION_MAX" AT (TO_DATE('2017-11-12','YYYY-MM-DD')) 
      INTO (PARTITION "PARTITION_20171111", PARTITION "PARTITION_MAX") UPDATE INDEXES PARALLEL
;

The above resulted in two partitions,

PARTITION "PARTITION_20171111"  VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE(' 2017-11-12 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS', 'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN'))

And

PARTITION "PARTITION_MAX"  VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE) SEGMENT CREATION IMMEDIATE

After this was complete, I gathered statistics to check that the row count in the partitions matched the actual distribution of data.