Hey David, there are a couple of different ideas that need to be unpacked in your post, specifically what it means to be in pain and what it means to heal. Our default cultural belief is that pain is a signifier of damage and that if we are in pain it must be because something is damaged. This is not true. Pain is a signifier of threat or danger. It is an output from the brain that urges us to protect specific areas of our body by modifying our behaviors to escape it. In many scenarios there is a good chance that an image would reveal degenerative structural changes to the specific area in pain. This is common in the case of tendinopathies but it does not mean that those changes have anything to do with your current pain experience. Those changes may have started occurring years before you started to even have any pain.
We also know that tendons in general don't structurally adapt/respond as well to training compared to other tissues like bone and muscle. This means there is a good chance an image of your tendon while you were having significant pain and now when you have no pain would most likely look very much the same. This is probably what Rip meant when he said it's not healed. The key thing here though is that your structural state of your elbow tendons, based on the history presented here, does not matter in deciding wether to train or not. What matters is wether you are in pain or not while you are lifting. Your elbow has not healed in the way a cut heals on your skin but your brain has decided that your current activity no longer poses a threat to the area so you can proceed with training.
After a year layoff I would recommend starting back with an LP. When things start getting hard again after a couple of months switch to an intermediate program. For some more resources to understand pain I'm linking a couple of short videos below. Hope this helps and good luck!
Tame the Beast