Abstract We present CO(3-2) emission observations toward the 3′$\times$3′ (or 20kpc$\times$20kpc at a distance of 23Mpc) region of the southern barred spiral galaxy NGC 986 using the Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment (ASTE). This effort is a part of our on-going extragalactic CO(3-2) imaging project, ADIoS (ASTE Dense gas Imaging of Spiral galaxies). Our CO(3-2) image revealed the presence of a large (the major axis is 14kpc in total length) gaseous bar filled with a dense molecular medium along the dark lanes observed in optical images. This is the largest “dense-gas rich bar” known to date. The dense gas bar, discovered in NGC 986, could be a huge reservoir of possible “fuel” for future starbursts in the central region, and we suggest that star formation in the central region of NGC 986 could still be in a growing phase. We found a good spatial coincidence between the overall distributions of dense molecular gas traced by CO(3-2) and massive star formation depicted by H$\alpha $. The global CO(3-2) luminosity, $L’_{\rm CO(3-2)}$, of NGC 986 was determined to be (5.4$\pm$1.1)$\times$10$^8$Kkms$^{-1}$pc$^2$. The CO(3-2)$/$CO(1-0) integrated intensity ratio was found to be 0.60$\pm$0.13 at a spatial resolution of 44$”$ or 5kpc, and the CO(3-2)$/$CO(2-1) ratio was 0.67$\pm$0.14 at a beam size of $\sim $25$”$ or $\sim $2.8kpc. These line ratios suggest moderate excitation conditions of CO lines ($n_{\rm H_2}$$\sim $10$^{3-4}$cm$^{-3}$) in a few kiloparsec region of central NGC 986.