In this article, we construct and analyse explicit numerical splitting methods for a class of semi-linear stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with additive noise, where the drift is allowed to grow polynomially and satisfies a global one-sided Lipschitz condition. The methods are proved to be mean-square convergent of order 1 and to preserve important structural properties of the SDE. In particular, first, they are hypoelliptic in every iteration step. Second, they are geometrically ergodic and have asymptotically bounded second moments. Third, they preserve oscillatory dynamics, such as amplitudes, frequencies and phases of oscillations, even for large time steps. Our results are illustrated on the stochastic FitzHugh-Nagumo model and compared with known mean-square convergent tamed/truncated variants of the Euler-Maruyama method. The capability of the proposed splitting methods to preserve the aforementioned properties makes them applicable within different statistical inference procedures. In contrast, known Euler-Maruyama type methods commonly fail in preserving such properties, yielding ill-conditioned likelihood-based estimation tools or computationally infeasible simulation-based inference algorithms.