Can I make chat gifs play only once?

Is there a way to get gifs posted in chat to only play once, or a few times? When action breaks and things slow down, watching the gif stuck in chat replay over and over gets tiresome.

Not really.  You could create gifs that only play so many times, but that's probably outside the scope of what you want to do. Your options are probably limited to just pushing it out of view with fluff messages, or clearing the chat on the gear tab. With the API, you could send messages that don't get retained in the permanent chat archive which could include gifs.  Doing that would have the gifs all disappear on a refresh. 

You can right click them and adblock them😊

Thanks you for the replies. I'll try those out. 

You've probably already sorted this out, but for future Googlers Ezigif is pretty handy, in the Optimiser there's an option to set the number of loops.