If you don’t want it to behave like a link, then don’t use a link tag. Doing so hurt accessibility of a page, and you don’t want that. There are other ways of browsing a website than a browser (think about the screen readers), which relies on the semantics of the page elements. Use a span if you simply want to apply a style.
If you still want to use an anchor, you can use this –
<a href="#" onclick="return false;">Link</a>
This will prevent your page reloading.