ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.msvccompiler' when trying to install numpy 1.16

I'm working inside a conda environment and I'm trying to downgrade numpy to version 1.16, but when running pip install numpy==1.16 I keep getting the following error:

$ pip install numpy==1.16
Collecting numpy==1.16
  Downloading numpy-1.16.0.zip (5.1 MB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 5.1/5.1 MB 10.8 MB/s eta 0:00:00
  Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
Building wheels for collected packages: numpy
  Building wheel for numpy (setup.py) ... error
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error
  
  × python setup.py bdist_wheel did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [17 lines of output]
      Running from numpy source directory.
      /tmp/pip-install-jdof0z8r/numpy_4597057bbb504aa18b7bda112f0aa37f/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py:476: SyntaxWarning: "is" with a literal. Did you mean "=="?
        return is_string(s) and ('*' in s or '?' is s)
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<string>", line 2, in <module>
        File "<pip-setuptools-caller>", line 34, in <module>
        File "/tmp/pip-install-jdof0z8r/numpy_4597057bbb504aa18b7bda112f0aa37f/setup.py", line 415, in <module>
          setup_package()
        File "/tmp/pip-install-jdof0z8r/numpy_4597057bbb504aa18b7bda112f0aa37f/setup.py", line 394, in setup_package
          from numpy.distutils.core import setup
        File "/tmp/pip-install-jdof0z8r/numpy_4597057bbb504aa18b7bda112f0aa37f/numpy/distutils/core.py", line 26, in <module>
          from numpy.distutils.command import config, config_compiler, \
        File "/tmp/pip-install-jdof0z8r/numpy_4597057bbb504aa18b7bda112f0aa37f/numpy/distutils/command/config.py", line 19, in <module>
          from numpy.distutils.mingw32ccompiler import generate_manifest
        File "/tmp/pip-install-jdof0z8r/numpy_4597057bbb504aa18b7bda112f0aa37f/numpy/distutils/mingw32ccompiler.py", line 34, in <module>
          from distutils.msvccompiler import get_build_version as get_build_msvc_version
      ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.msvccompiler'
      [end of output]
  
  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
  ERROR: Failed building wheel for numpy
  Running setup.py clean for numpy
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error
  
  × python setup.py clean did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [10 lines of output]
      Running from numpy source directory.
      
      `setup.py clean` is not supported, use one of the following instead:
      
        - `git clean -xdf` (cleans all files)
        - `git clean -Xdf` (cleans all versioned files, doesn't touch
                            files that aren't checked into the git repo)
      
      Add `--force` to your command to use it anyway if you must (unsupported).
      
      [end of output]
  
  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
  ERROR: Failed cleaning build dir for numpy
Failed to build numpy
ERROR: ERROR: Failed to build installable wheels for some pyproject.toml based projects (numpy)

How can I resolve this?

What seemed to solve this issue was installing a specific version of setuptools (<65) into the conda environment:

conda install "setuptools <65"