Professional studios often have more than 8 mics at a time on a drum kit. You could have any of the following:
Kick in (ie inside the kick drum)
kick out
snare top
snare bottom (bottom mics are only used in conjunction with top mics... nobody uses them by themselves)
toms top and bottom (however many toms you have)
hi-hat
left overhead, right overhead
maybe room mics (stereo pair)
if it's jazz, maybe a spot mic on the ride for a little extra definition
With three toms, doing top and bottom for all the drums and in/out for the snare, and a stereo pair as room mics, that comes out to like 15 mics. It just depends on the engineer and how many channels are available. I heard of a guy I know use 20 mics in a session sometime last week. I think that's a little excessive, but whatever.
If you have nice overheads (and the key is having NICE overheads, not some condenser mic that's like $100), you can get a really great drum sound from that (and maybe a kick mic). I did a session last week with 11 mics. But the overheads (Neumann TLM 103s) sounded so good that I almost didn't want to use the rest of the kit at all (including the kick! they really blew me away!). Of course, when it comes time to mix, and you're putting all the other instruments on top of it, you never know when you're going to want a little more of one particular part of the kit.
Another thing you can do instead of using a gate is to go into the track in a DAW and delete all the space in the track where the drum isn't making noise. This can take a little time with something like kick and snare (and needs to be done carefully or you can make your drums really sound like crap), but it generally doesn't take too much time for toms and generally has a better result that using a gate (which also needs to be done carefully or you'll screw up your sound).
But you can also just be careful with how you set up your mics. The biggest bleed is between snare and hi-hat. You'll most likely be using cardioid mics for that (like, 100% of the time unless you're feeling really experimental for some reason), so you can position the snare mic so that it rejects sound from the hi-hat and vice versa.