I think this is too low level to use transparently via Class::DBI.
I'm not too concerned about how to convert the dates but where.
At what level of the Class::DBI architecture?

If there's something in MySQL like Postgres' PGDATESTYLE="ISO,European" which made date handling transparent then that would do the trick. I couldn't find such an option so decided that automatic handling in Perl would be better than fiddling with SQL.