What are you talking about? The only part of Mir not launched on a Proton-K was a docking module brought up by, yes, shuttle so that a shuttle could dock to the station and American astronauts could learn about long duration spaceflight from the Russians.

Shuttles weren’t required for the construction of Mir, just as China is now constructing its space station without the use of a shuttle.

The idea that shuttles are or were required to learn about long duration space flight is simply wrong

From Wikipedia:

Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until it was surpassed by the ISS on 23 October 2010

We could have managed without the shuttle.