With high bandwidth, low interference, and low power consumption, optical network-on-chip (ONoC) has emerged as a highly efficient interconnection for the future generation of multicore system on chips. In this paper, we propose a new path-setup method for ONoC to mitigate contentions, such as packets, by recycling the setup packet halfway to the destination. A new, strictly non-blocking $6{ imes}6$ optical router is designed to support the new method. The simulation results show the new path-setup method increases the throughput by 52.03%, 41.94%, and 36.47% under uniform, hotspot-I, and hotspot-II traffic patterns, respectively. The end-to-end delay performance is also improved.