How to put and align figures in multicols environment - latex

Question

I write an article, which is divided into two columns separated by a line. I use multicol package. I want to insert figures and align them to the top or to the down of the page in multicols environment. Figures can be inserted by the use of minipage environment by i don't know how to align them up or down. figure environment does not work in multicols environment.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{caption}
\geometry{margin=0.75in}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{2}
\lipsum[1-3]
\vfill
\begin{minipage}{\linewidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{beta_glucan.png}
\captionof{figure}{Figure caption}
\end{minipage}
\lipsum[1-3]
\end{multicols}
\end{document}
Any help will be appreciated cause I have been loosing time at it since friday.

Answer 1

Non-multicols solution:
\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{geometry}
%\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage{float}
\geometry{margin=0.75in}
\setlength{\columnseprule}{0.4pt}
\begin{document}
% \begin{multicols}{2}
\lipsum[1-3]
\begin{figure}[tb]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{example-image}
\caption{Figure caption}
\end{figure}
\lipsum[1-3]
% \end{multicols}
\end{document}