You can use arithmetic expansion:
result=$(( $(ls | wc - l) - 1))
or just ignore one of the files
result=$(ls | tail -n+2 | wc -l)
Note that it doesn't work if filenames contain the newline character; use ls -q to get one filename per line in such a case. This applies to the first solution, too, if you're interested in the number of files and not the number of lines in their names.